Now into its 4th year the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse has kicked the door open on the question most Australians have not been willing to acknowledge, let alone deal with. Day after day the Royal Commissioners are confronted with harrowing tales of sexual predators being allowed by religious groups of all dominations to continue to abuse children, in some cases for decades.
The men of God have now been forced to answer to Caesar as it’s blatantly obvious they were more interested in protecting their religious groups’ reputation than giving survivors of child sexual abuse a second glance. The responsibility for the cover-ups and the continued abuse of children in state run institutions and religious run institutions is fundamentally a community issue. For decades adults who were abused who raised these issues were slandered, marginalised and ignored. In some cases the institutional response to their abuse claims caused more problems for them than the abuse itself. As a community we failed to take seriously the claims made by people who were sexually abused.
It’s no accident the claims of abuse never jolted the authorities into action. The survivors were challenging powerful institutions that in many cases claim they are doing God’s work on earth. For decades they were able to deflect criticism by using the law to marginalise victims and were never forced to take responsibility for their actions. Although thousands of complaints had been made over decades, although a few victims had victories in court our political representatives, many of whom are influenced by their religious beliefs, refused to take abuse claims seriously. It took Prime Minister Julia Gillard, an atheist, to call the current Royal Commission into Institutionalised Child Abuse.
For far too long religious groups have had too much of an influence on many Australian political representatives. The work of a Ballarat police officer who demonstrated the very high rate of suicide among survivors in Ballarat (the epicentre of the infamous Ballarat based Catholic Church paedophile group) was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Faced with calls for a Royal Commission into institutionalised sex abuse, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stared down the churches and called the current Royal Commission.
It’s highly likely a Prime Minister with strong religious beliefs would never have called a Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse. Julia Gillard will go down in history as the Prime Minister who had the courage to lift the lid on the dirty little secrets of many religious based organisations in this country. When you couple the Royal Commission with her support for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the greatest social innovation in this country since the introduction of Medicare in 1973, will ensure she is remembered not for being Australia’s first female Prime Minister, but for ushering in some of the most important social legislation since the dismissal of the Whitlam led Labor government in 1975.
Dr. Joseph Toscano