WHEN the chairman of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Justice Peter McClellan, thanked the Newcastle Herald for its reporting of crimes against children, he was recognising the bravery of those whose determination to step forward has allowed the Herald to campaign as it has.
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Although we like to believe that the truth will always find a way to emerge, and that good will eventually triumph over evil, history shows that this is not necessarily the case.
Not all perpetrators are caught. Not all bad deeds are punished. Not all victims or survivors are properly recompensed for the pain and suffering inflicted on them. But thanks to this Royal Commission, the spotlight has been shone like never before on the perpetrators of these heinous crimes, and, just as importantly, on those who have protected them.
It will be three years this week since the commission held its first public hearing. Although conducted in Sydney, it, too, related to events in the Hunter Region, examining the response of various agencies to a former head of the Hunter Aboriginal Children’s Services, Stephen Larkin, who was prosecuted in 2012 for offences committed some 15 years earlier.
All up, the royal commission has examined 43 separate case studies: a 44th hearing, into a serial Catholic paedophile, John Joseph Farrell, starts in Sydney on Monday. The Newcastle Anglican hearing – which ran out of time before some key witnesses could give evidence – will resume in Sydney on Wednesday, November 16.
As well as the public hearings, the commission has conducted a substantial number of private sessions. The commission’s final report is due before the end of its formal term of inquiry at the close of 2017, but findings have already been published for about half of its case studies. On top of this work, the commission has published various consultation and research papers, and Justice McClellan has given a number of speeches, all part of a brief to not only investigate the abuse of children, but to find ways to best ensure it does not flare again.
The commission’s hearings, in Newcastle and elsewhere, have rarely made for easy listening or reading, and they have revealed a side of Australia, and Australians, that does not, in the main, do us proud. It’s an investigation, however, that we, as a nation, simply had to have.
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