First year since Debelle inquiry report into abuse in South Australian schools was submitted

TUESDAY will mark one year since former Supreme Court judge Bruce Debelle submitted his report of child sexual abuse in South Australian schools, shocking the state and prompted education system reforms.

IT started with one parent daring to speak out and became the issue that dominated public and political debate for more than a year.

In October 2012, a mother revealed parents had not been told of a rape at a western suburbs school for two years.

Her bravery prompted dozens more victims to come forward and their experiences informed former Supreme Court Justice Bruce Debelle’s Royal Commission inquiry.

Handed down a year ago, the 280-page report was a scathing assessment of failures within the Education Department and made 43 recommendations.

Since then there has been a clean-out of the department, a new CEO and more reviews and restructures.

There have been fewer high-profile abuse reports since and those which have emerged have been dealt with more swiftly.

The State Government clarified guidelines for reporting and handling serious incidents, allocated more resources to screen those who work with children and toughened laws on sex offending.

Much judgment has been passed on the authorities, but none of this would have come to light if not for the bravery of victims and parents who spoke out.

They include Danyse Soester and Mel Calone — mothers of children at the school that sparked the Debelle inquiry — who ended up running for Parliament.

And others who kept a lower profile as they fought to support abused children.

Public debate may have moved on but these families are stuck in a painful new reality.

ADELAIDE HILLS SCHOOL

THE last time David saw his daughter completely at peace was more than three years ago.

The father of two dropped Emma off to school in the Adelaide Hills, not knowing how that day would shatter their family.

“I thought at that moment she is so happy, I’m so proud of this girl. That’s the girl I lament. I haven’t seen her since.”

After school that day in March 2010, Emma, who was 11 at the time, came home to tell her parents she had been assaulted by another girl in a school toilet block.

The case was one of many to come to light as part of the Debelle Royal Commission into sexual abuse in schools.

The family argues the school and Education Department poorly handled the case and they soon pulled Emma out of the school.

It was the beginning of a roller-coaster no parent or child can prepare for.

“At first you’ve got no idea what’s actually happened,” David told the Sunday Mail.

“I remember crying … you’re reeling in shock. Then you think she’ll be all right.

“Suddenly the penny drops and that’s literally when your life turns upside down.”

More than four years on, the family is barely coping.

Now 15, Emma has bounced from school to school before resorting to homeschooling. She has been diagnosed with depression, is on medication to try to stop her from harming herself and has been hospitalised after suicide attempts.

There can be no sharps around the house and the task of watching over her is so intensive her father has had to downsize his job.

Medical and counselling bills and the costs of private schooling have put the family under enormous financial strain.

A constantly tense home life threatens to tear the family of four apart and they are often made to feel like “leppers” in their community for speaking out against the abuse of their daughter.

“You become resentful,” Emma’s mother Amelia said.

“You’ve got this anger and grief.

“We don’t have downtime. We’re just waiting for the next situation

“We try and do normal things … but this underlines it all.”

Before the assault Emma was funny and lively. She made video diaries with friends and looked for adventure.

Now she is a quiet and withdrawn shadow of that girl, lacking confidence and self-esteem.

“She just expects things to go wrong now,” Amelia said.

“The moment she told people (about the assault) she witnessed this unleashing of turmoil, this complete chaos.

“She felt responsible.

“She feels so bad on the inside it (self-harm) is like a manifestation on the outside, a physical pain for all that internal pain. She wears the scars.”

The toll on the rest of the family is evident too.

David has developed anxiety and describes he and Amelia as “passing ships” at home, as they work in shifts to keep watch over their broken child.

Their younger son, who looks up to Emma, is heartbroken to see his big sister suffering.

He has also faced problems at their original school.

Sunday nights at home were the worst, as anxiety about attending school the next day built.

“The atmosphere in the house was terrible, everyone just walking on eggshells,” David said.

“You’d ask her to stack the dishwasher and bang — the violence, chairs thrown, smashing crockery. Then we’d all be just devastated.

“The stress just builds up and its like a fog. You feel sleepy, you’re tired, you’re heart is almost in a cramp.

“You realise that the whole fabric of the family is starting to fall apart.”

Amelia describes life now as like “wading through mud”.

“What comes with this is an unpredictability from one day to the next,” she said.

“Her depression was so debilitating, her anxiety levels were so high.

“You’ll think you’re making progress and then there’ll be a setback.

“There were times where I would wake up in the morning and be disappointed I had woken up because it was so painful to deal with the day.”

One of the few positives the family cling to is that Emma had the strength to report her abuse.

The first inkling of a problem came in a text from the out-of-school-hours carer who said Emma had mentioned something bad had happened at school.

It wasn’t until she got home that she bravely opened up to her parents.

“She’d been bottling that up,” David said.

“I held her hand and she just completely broke down.

“She didn’t even have the vocabulary to really describe what had happened.”

However, sadly, Emma now feels the consequences of revealing what happened may not have been worth it.

“Seeing everybody unable to cope … had she known what it would unleash, I doubt she would have done it,” David said.

The biggest fear for the family is that this horrible event will define the rest of their lives.

Emma is seeing both a psychologist and psychiatrist and will attempt to tackle Year 11 next year.

The challenges of the past four years will follow her, and the family.

“What we’re scared of is that this will be her life, that she won’t be able to live a normal life,” Amelia said.

“She’s a really creative, intelligent person. She has that adventurous spirit, its still in there.

“She has an incredible voice. She is a talented dancer.

“That person wants to do well, wants and independent life.

“But there is this traumatised, depressed side of her that, at the moment, has the power.

“That (passion) was pretty much extinguished the moment this happened.

“We didn’t know it at the time of course, but it just left her.”

From where they stand now, there is little light at the end of the tunnel, but they hold

out hope that one day that girl who looked forward to school, and life, will resurface.

“Emma and I harbour a dream,” confessed he father “that if we can just get some of this crap out of the way, we’ll hire a campervan and we’ll just drive around Australia and leave it all behind.”

RURAL SCHOOL

THE image of her eldest son’s face on that day in late 2010 will never leave Denise.

Through wracking sobs then 11-year-old Joshua confessed that he had been violently and sexually assaulted by an older boy that day at school.

“Those first few seconds were that of disbelief,” mother of two Denise told the Sunday Mail.

“His face, his body language at that moment will be with me always.

“As he relayed what had happened to him through such distressed cries, clinging tightly to me … at that moment our world changed.”

Joshua was attacked in a toilet block at a rural school on December 1, 2010, during school hours.

His attacker, then aged 13, was convicted of rape but given a suspended sentence.

Eerily, the incident happened on the same day as the rape of a female student at a western suburbs school which sparked the Debelle Royal Commission.

Like many of the parents who have found themselves in this unimaginable situation, Carol had no idea how to respond.

“I couldn’t fix this,” she said.

“As a parent it is your job to fix things that have hurt your child or harmed or upset them … to make it better.

“How could I even begin to console my child that all is OK when it wasn’t and there was no help?

“He had so many questions but I had no explanation or comforting words for him.

“I wanted to tell everyone what had happened and also to warn others … but I couldn’t as I had to protect my son. There was an element of guilt for not telling (others).

“Trying to maintain a normal functioning life and strong support for my son while I was actually crumbling, trembling, screaming, my world spinning on the inside — the strain was unimaginable.”

The following months blurred into a whirl of phone calls, letters and meetings as the family went through the court process and sought counselling and support from the school and Education Department.

Denise also had to fight to have her son’s attacker sent to another school outside their regional town.

“They were such dark days, filled with grief, anger and confusion,” she said.

“I was totally consumed by this crime.

“It was just such a terrible, out of control path that we had been thrown into

“There were no answers, no real help and nothing to take the enormous weight of it away.”

Denise described her attempts to “act normal” for the sake of her son as like “learning to act in a play”.

She struggled to make small talk at work, listening to other people’s “minor problems while holding this secret pain on the inside was unbearable, while spending all her spare time emailing the school, counsellors, prosecutors, victims of crime or the Department.

She lost friends in the months after the attack. Some she “pushed away, afraid that I would crumble and be unable to get up again if they came too close”.

Telling her family and her own parents that Joshua had been the victim of such a disturbing assault, Denise saw the helplessness she felt reflected in them.

“They watched me crumble to the floor, beside myself in internal pain, them sharing the same pain of being unable to help me, as I was unable to help my son,” she said.

There remains the fear of running into the attacker, who continues to live in the town.

“When we drive through town I can feel my son scanning the area for him, as I unconsciously do as well,” she said.

“There is always a fear of running into (him).”

Joshua, now 15, is trying to get on with life but there is always a reminder of what happened — hearing his name, seeing someone of similar build, hearing about a similar crime in the news.

Denise is not sure what the long term impact will be on her boy as he grows into a young man and “realises the full evil of what happened that day”.

WESTERN SUBURBS SCHOOL

IT was guilt that hit mother of two Mel Calone first, the feeling that she should have caught it earlier.

When the call from the school came in late 2012 it began the “merry-go-round” that completely changed their family.

Mel’s daughter Ella had been inappropriately touched by a carer at her western suburbs out-of-school-hours care program — and she hadn’t known.

For two years her daughter had kept quiet. And worse, the school had kept quiet.

But the truth will out, and eventually Ella revealed what she had kept hidden since 2010.

“The first thing you think is you dropped the ball as a parent, that you haven’t noticed this stuff,” she told the Sunday Mail.

“I don’t think you can prepare for something like that.”

Mel believes Ella — who was seven at the time of the incident and is now 11 — may have tried to tell her some months before that call from the school, but in a hectic life of full-time work and single motherhood it slipped through the cracks.

“I remember picking (Ella and her sister) up from out-of-school-hours care one day and her saying to me that something weird had happened, but she didn’t really want to talk about it,” she said.

“In retrospect I think why didn’t I do something then?

“I could have had a longer conversation. I could have explored it a bit more.

“Eventually it all comes out. I kind of lost the plot, and then we started the merry-go-round.”

By the time the truth came to light the OSHC carer had been convicted of raping another girl at the school.

That case eventually sparked the Debelle Royal Commission.

In the almost two years since that case was made public in late 2012, Mel cut back on work hours and ended up on benefits as she became consumed by finding the right help for her daughter and trying to get to the bottom of what happened in their school community.

It even led her to run as an independent candidate in the March state election.

During that campaign, she was publicly outed as a sex worker — a job the former union official says she took up to pay the bills.

“I was on a mission. How do you support your kid in something like that, and not make the situation any worse?” she said.

“While you’re dying inside trying to work out how to explain to your kid how this happened, and move your family through that so its not going to torture them for the rest of their lives, how do you also find the energy to fight a (education system that is trying desperately to bury it?

“I think that’s still an issue today.”

The Calone family has since moved to the other side of the city, and Ella has had some counselling.

There is still a lot of anger, but they’re trying to move on.

“She’ll always remember it, but hopefully it won’t be as horrific as it has been,” Mel said.

“She said to me ‘I would think about it at night-time Mum but I would just put it out of my head’.

“She shouldn’t have had to think about that.”

If there is a positive to come from all this, it stems a little from that initial guilt Mel felt.

She now makes time for the conversations that need to be had.

“It made us sit down and talk about things that we never thought we would talk about,” she said.

“When your kid says ‘I felt a bit weird about that’ try to have a conversation.

“Put the phones away.

“We never used to sit at the table and have dinner but its one of those things that we do regularly now.

“You’ve just got to talk through that stuff.

“What more can you do?”

● To protect their privacy, names have been changed

HOW THE DEBELLE INQUIRY UNFOLDED

OCT 30, 2012

The rape of a student at a western suburbs school is revealed in Parliament.

The incident occurred in December, 2010, but was kept from parents for two years.

The case prompted the State Government to commission an independent inquiry, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Bruce Debelle, which was later given Royal Commission.

The Ombudsman also launched an investigation into the case.

NOV 14

A mother reveals her son, 11, was raped by another male student, 13, in a rural school toilet block on December 1, 2010.

The perpetrator pleaded guilty to rape and was given a suspended sentence.

He now attends a separate high school.

Other parents were not notified of the incident.

The Education Department is paying to transport the perpetrator to a different school to keep the boys separate.

DEC 14

It is revealed that a 53-year-old male teacher at an eastern suburbs school was arrested in May 2012, for child sex and other offences.

The charges related to alleged offences committed against a female who was a student between Years 8 and 11 some time between July 2008 and December 2009.

On the same day it was also revealed that Barry Douglas Wright, a teacher at an inner-city school, was convicted in relation to child abuse charges relating to events in 2007 and 2009.

DEC 21

A father reveals his daughter, 11, was exposed to a ``prolonged, violent sexual assault’’ by another student who locked her in a toilet cubicle at an Adelaide primary school in March, 2010.

The victim was forced to change schools.

The Education Department’s then chief executive Chris Robinson wrote to the family in April 2010 saying the child’s attacker could not be excluded from the school because there was no police conviction, although the school and the department did not dispute the family’s version of events.

JAN 21, 2013

Education Minister Grace Portolesi is demoted by Premier Jay Weatherill in a Cabinet reshuffle and replaced by Jennifer Rankine.

FEB 15

It is revealed a man charged in January with serious sex offences involving a disadvantaged student had been fined previously for indecent behaviour, but the offence was not investigated in a check of his criminal history.

The 37-year-old man was arrested and charged with seven counts of unlawful sexual intercourse and two counts of indecent assault involving a 16-year-old.

He worked for an organisation contracted by the Education Department.

His 2009 police clearance found he was fined $400 for a ``historical’’ offence of indecent behaviour but the staffer who approved the man to work with children overlooked the offence.

JULY 1, 2013

Former Supreme Court Justice Bruce Debelle’s 280-page report into sex-abuse cases in public schools made 43 recommendations, all of which the Government accepted “in principle”.

JULY 2

Ms Rankine announces there will be an independent review into the operation of the department to be conducted by former Victorian Education chief executive Peter Allen.

JULY 16

Former SA Police assistant commissioner Tony Harrison is appointed new Education Department CEO, following the resignation of Keith Bartley in the wake of the Debelle report.

SEP 25

MPs call on Ms Rankine and Ms Portolesi to give evidence to an Upper House Select Committee investigating child protection issues stemming from the Debelle royal commission. They refused.

SEP 26

Mr Harrison reveals that, as a result of the disciplinary proceedings, department deputy CEO Gino DeGennaro had resigned and Office for Non-Government Schools CEO Jan Andrews would not have her contract renewed. Ms Andrews later described herself to a parliamentary committee as a “scapegoat”.

SEP 27

Mr Allen delivers his 20-page report, finding the Education Department has a “risk-averse culture” that blames the “system” for its failures.

NOV 26

Parliamentary committee investigating child protection issues delivers interim report warning policies about informing ministers of serious incidents in schools are still unclear. The Committee released a final report about a month out from the March 15 state election.

FEB 18, 2014

Danyse Soester — the mother of two children who attended the western suburbs school at the centre of the Debelle report — reveals that she will run at the March election as an independent candidate in Ms Rankine’s seat of Wright.

Ms Soester’s persistence in pushing for the incident to be made public was key to establishing the Royal Commission.

FEB 24

Mel Calone — also a mother of two children who attended the western suburbs school at the centre of the Debelle report — reveals that she will run at the March election as an independent candidate in the Labor-held seat of Lee.

The Liberal Party funded a radio ad in which Ms Calone attacked the Government over child sex abuse issues.

MAR 15

Labor retained Government and Mr Weatherill and Ms Rankine held their seats. The two mothers who ran as independents garnered only a few hundred votes.

JULY 1

One year since the release of the Debelle report.