TRUST.
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It’s a thing that, often enough or seriously enough betrayed, becomes hard to give again.
Few people, perhaps, have experienced such a deep betrayal of trust as those who have been abused – particularly in childhood – by those who are put forward as spiritual and moral leaders.
How hard it must be for those people to trust any other person, no matter what promises of justice or healing or righting of past wrongs might be proffered in return.
When she accepted her gold Walkley award this week, Newcastle Herald journalist Joanne McCarthy acknowledged as much, thanking the many people who had taken the risk of giving her their confidence and sharing with her their stories and their information.
The award McCarthy received – the highest award in Australian journalism – is acknowledgement that their trust was not misplaced. She used the material entrusted to her hands to build, step by painstaking and difficult step, a case in favour of a Royal Commission into institutional abuse that became impossible for authorities to resist.
McCarthy’s description in her acceptance speech of the way she and the many who stood behind her built that case was a vivid one.
The process, she said, was like digging a hole, hunkering down and taking cover against furious reaction and then extending the hole whenever the counter-attack died down. It sounded like a description of trench warfare, where territory is gained incrementally, at great effort and against massive and determined opposition.
And so it was.
Even before this newspaper threw its entire weight behind her effort, launching the Shine a Light campaign that culminated in victory when the Gillard government announced the Royal Commission, McCarthy had been fighting solidly for years.
Opponents had fired salvoes from pulpits, sniped from distant sidelines and poured volley after volley of stinging shots from the offices of hired lawyers.
But as the journalist again pointed out in her speech, her defences held because they were built on solid foundations of fairness, balance and – especially – truth.
Each new piece of truth volunteered by a contact advanced the cause, and all the old defences of denial, inertia and threat that had protected the abusers crumbled one by one and fell.
‘‘You don’t need an army to do things,’’ McCarthy said.
‘‘You just need people believing that something has to be done.’’
And you need trust.