SUCH BRAVE HEARTS

Two important developments in the war against child abuse in the past few days. One here in Australia. One in the United States. One depressing and one showing a glimmer of hope and understanding.

The depressing, even ignorant, news was here in Australia where a new report showed that almost 25% of those adults surveyed did not condemn sex between a 14-year-old girl and an adult. They did not see that as sexual abuse.

Presumably, they pine for Peter Hollingworth’s return to Yarralumla. After all, that was his television defence for his lack of action against a 27-year-old married priest, a boarding school housemaster, who seduced one of his 14-year-old charges.

Remember, on Australian Story, the Governor-General and former Anglican Archbishop of Queensland, said that it wasn’t child abuse or anything like that.Rather the other way round.

And the same survey released this week showed that one in ten Australian adults did not support prison sentences for parents convicted of sexually assaulting their children.

The family that lays together – stays together.

Now, I obviously don’t believe that the 10% who oppose jail are all guilty of incest. But don’t these ignorant or deluded people realise that the “ jail card” is the one most played by incestuous fathers while coercing their daughters (and sons) into “keeping our little secret”?

They say things like: “Don’t tell anybody because if you do then Daddy might go to jail…. and who would look after you and Mummy?”

And thousands of pressured and assaulted and scared kids have kept that foul secret for years. And the abuse has gone on and on.

The second news that showed some light at the end of the tunnel was out of the United States. The Catholic Church announced it would finally pay compensation to victims over the systematic sexual assaults on children by priests in the Boston Archdiocese in Massachusetts.

The Church will pay $ US85 million dollars. They have acknowledged that 524 victims deserve compensation for what perverted priests did to them over decades while Church leaders turned a blind eye.

The encouraging news out of that decision reaffirms something I have long believed and commented on. Church leaders from Brisbane to Boston are only now being dragged into the reality of the real world by their fears of more and more lawsuits.

They are only now accepting that telling victims (and their parents) to hush up for the sake of the Church and merely transferring a paedophile priest to another parish was not only morally and religiously reprehensible. It was legally and financially flawed.

I believe, only the threat of massive financial payouts (like this week’s $85 million) has prompted a review of cover-up practices from Vermont to The Vatican.

We have seen how church leaders enjoy the high life. We have seen how the Vatican bankers operated so avariciously around the world. When church leaders and their accountants have to start selling investments to pay for lawsuits it is a different ballgame

The clever but callous tactic of ducking and denial is finally being nailed.

Coincidentally, on the day that both those stories came out I was in Brisbane as guest speaker at a corporate fundraising lunch for Bravehearts -- the plucky, earnest, fledgling child abuse fighting group up there.

It was founded and run by Hetty Johnston -- an indefatigable campaigner who even describes herself as a tank and who was a key campaigner in newspapers and on television during Governor-General Hollingworth’s self-serving attempt to keep his Canberra privileges.

It was Bravehearts annual White Balloon Day and they released a cartoon CD for kids and a more explicit booklet for parents – to guide them on how to teach your children about inappropriate touching and sexual secrets.

(I guess the ten per cent of people who think fathers shouldn’t go to jail for having sex with their five-year-old daughters won’t read it).

The things that hit me hardest at that luncheon were two-fold.

The first was that “the corporates” – the top end of town – will go to charity functions and (generously) pay $25,000 for a signed cricket bat. They will go to Calcutta nights at the Spring Carnival and pay $50,000 for a horse.

But helping finance a child sexual assault victim group is sort of unseemly and uncomfortable.

We all applauded at Bravehearts when a guest paid $1000 for a donated washing machine.

The second thing that got to me in Brisbane was the sheer number of victims who came up to me after my speech. I’d seen and heard it all before. But it was a reminder of this much-hidden epidemic of the theft of childhood innocence.

Many of the women I spoke to were middle-aged. Abused as children at a time when nobody talked about it. Even the mothers that knew.

But, encouragingly, there were women in their twenties now prepared to bravely go public.

They have a long way to go. One woman could not prevent the welling tears as she told me about her daughter -- molested from the age of four to 21.

The man who did it is “known to Police”. He still runs a sporting/entertainment complex in Queensland.

Whenever her daughter even sees the stadium on the TV news she freezes and almost retches.

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003