While many of the headlines have chosen to focus on the Catholic rite of confession, just one of the 85 recommendations on criminal justice from the Royal Commission into Sexual Abuse, it is worth recalling a key broader objective in preventing all future abuse.
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The commission notes some instances of perpetrators confessing but it would be interesting to see just how often this has occurred. The amoral power games played by perpetrators and their sinister “do-not-tell” pacts, which we have seen in case after case in the Central Highlands region, do not on appearance lend themselves to a scenario where these same abusers would likely struggle with pangs of guilt and feel a need to confess.
In addition, if abusers are by their nature unlikely to confess they are even less likely to do so in a confessional situation which may have criminal repercussions, so the question remains whether this change would have any benefit.
Victims who have mentioned abuse in the same scenario, is another matter altogether. Their’s is not the guilt and directing them to proper recourse, justice and personal help should always have been a key step to reconciling the damage. Condemning victims to secrecy, wherever it occurs, is one of the clear and terrible lessons of how the shattering trauma was made worse.
But it is a wider culture of secrecy, colluded with and reinforced from fear of scandal or reputational damage - whether in the church or other institutions which should be the focus. Over its worst decades in the region from the 1950s to the 1980s this amounted to active and deliberate obfuscation of hundreds of cases but also included the less nefarious but almost as destructive culture that it “wasn’t that big a problem” or “not my responsibility”.
The commission is loud and clear in its belief it is necessary to impose criminal liability for failure to report in cases where a person should have suspected the abuse. What is a reasonable suspicion has yet to be defined but it is hoped a clear declaration of the law and any institutions obligations to protect children will resolve the conflict of duty between civil and religious law, the grey area between the secular and spiritual.
If this can help solve the most glaring error of those decades, a displacement of priorities where the suffering of the innocent was sacrificed for the sanctity of an institution, then it is a step toward a better future.