rALLYING FOR THE CAUSE

And so there we were yesterday afternoon. Several thousand people emerging from the fog and on to the steps and surrounds of Parliament House. And I looked out over a sea of faces, many tear-stained. Faces, old and young, faces that variously showed pain and anger and frustration and determination and hope.

An unlikely crowd of protesters drawn together by a common, often tragic cause. People like the Halvagis family and the Irwins who had lost daughters at the hands of killers who had been given chance after chance by the legal system.

And others whose children had been raped twice. By child molesters and then by the courts as paedophiles walked free. And some of their children, robbed of their childhood and their innocence, couldn’t take the pressure any more and killed themselves.

There was the case of a woman whose sons were among seven victims of the family doctor. In court his lawyer argued that ‘no actual harm had been done to the boys’. And both her sons committed suicide within 15 months of each other.

Yesterday there were middle-aged victims who had suffered in silence with their secrets and who had never had a skerrick of justice. They came from a time when you didn’t talk about such things and the local priest couldn’t possibly have done those dirty things to you.

They came to protest against a terrible law that allows convicted rapists and serial child sex offenders to rejoin the community incognito. Their names and images censored by court suppression orders.

And, at last count, nearly 3000 people had signed my petition to have that law changed so that these degenerates cannot have legal protection.

These weren’t vigilantes. And I am solidly opposed to such behaviour. But I said then, and I still believe, you have a right to know who these people are and where they are living.

A brave Shirley Irwin, whose two daughters were raped and murdered by a criminal with a violent, drunken past, tugged at our heartstrings yesterday  when she said ‘enough is enough’.

I agree. On the steps of Parliament House yesterday I named a serial rapist and one of this country’s worst paedophiles.  The Age newspaper which virtually named one of them on Page One today by using his notorious nickname, says I could go to jail –again – for what I did yesterday. We’ll see.
But we obviously have a long way to go. Just before going to yesterday’s rally I read the story in the Sunday Herald Sun about a paedophile priest. Father Adelrick D’Cruz of Clayton South.

When he was at St. Joseph’s  Church in Banally, a teenager went to the church to ask for help when she missed  her bus home. D’Cruz, then in his mid-fifties, indecently assaulted her.

It turns out he attacked five other girls from the same extended family in the 1970s and 1980s.

So what happened? He’s been fined $500 and given a two-year good behaviour bond. Even though County Court judge Frank Shelton said the crime was a ‘gross breach of trust and a complete negation of your vocation as a Catholic priest.’

But it gets worse. D’Cruz’s superior, Bishop Joseph Grech, apologised to the victims at a meeting two years ago but then asked them if they would mind of their attacker said Mass at an ceremony marking one of his rape victim’s fortieth anniversary as a nun.

Yesterday’s rally was another step but for the sake of the children we still have a long way to go.

Monday, June 2, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008