THE Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been a five-year investigation, and ultimately an assertion, of the rights of the child. But it’s been much more than that.
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It’s been an exhaustive examination of what can happen when society’s “pillars” are unchallenged for too long, and when social stability is prioritised over protecting the vulnerable from the powerful. In so doing the royal commission has been a very public statement, and reinforcement, of what Australians believe in.
The royal commission was the backdrop to a succession of abuse of power scandals that have disgusted the community and disgraced governments, regulators, corporations and the very structures we once thought acted in the public interest.
It investigated abuses of power against children while NSW investigated and prosecuted former government ministers; while major banks were exposed as serial corporate wrong-doers; while major companies, billionaires and millionaires were outed as tax avoiders; while the media exposed shocking abuses of power against Indigenous Australians, the elderly, people with disabilities, the unemployed, the homeless.
It exposed the suffering behind the societal norm that “children should be seen but not heard” while the Australian Government aggressively defended the indefinite detention of refugee children on Nauru and breached one of the commission’s clearest lessons – if you have the care of children, their welfare must be prioritised above other considerations.
The royal commission examined institutional abuse while child abuse and neglect reports across Australia climbed. In 2011-12 there were nearly 253,000 reports of physical, mental and sexual abuse and neglect of children in households across the country. By 2015-16 the figured had climbed to 355,000, according to the Australian Government’s Institute of Family Studies.
The royal commission showed why those statistics should horrify Australians into action by spelling out the consequences of childhood abuse.
In November 2012, after Julia Gillard established the royal commission, an unprecedented 95 per cent of people in a Fairfax-Nielsen poll supported the decision.
On Monday Ms Gillard disputed that it reflected a community need for powerful people to be held to account for decades of systemic child sexual abuse. She thought the priority for Australians was to give survivors an opportunity for their voices to be heard, and to be believed.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree.
It was essential that survivors of institutional child sexual abuse were at the centre of the royal commission’s work. But just as essential was forensic questioning of powerful people – church leaders, school principals, bureaucrats, welfare agency heads, charity chief executives, lawyers – for their actions and inactions in the face of child sex allegations.
Without the public accountability there is no prospect of change, or confidence in the future. Without public acknowledgement that power and authority were abused, at times to a criminal degree, there is no internal examination of the institutional culture that supported it. Without public acknowledgement of the gross betrayal of trust and moral failure, there is no necessary re-alignment of the relationship between the powerful institution, its powerful leaders and the rest of society.
Which is why some institutions and their leaders continue to struggle. They’ve apologised, of course, but there’s little insight into the loss of public respect and authority.
One of the most telling exchanges of the royal commission occurred in Newcastle in August 2016, when former Maitland-Newcastle Catholic Bishop Michael Malone was questioned by commission chair Justice Peter McClellan. The bishop said he reached the point where “You either had to try to defend the church or you had to try to serve the needs of survivors, and I chose the latter”. Justice McClellan responded, “Why was it ever a choice?”
Australians have backed this lengthy, expensive royal commission because, after decades of economic and political shifts that have concentrated power and changed society, crimes against children by churches marked the time to say “Enough”.
The test, now, is whether we demand the necessary changes.