Monsters really do exist

It was chilling last week watching Australia’s worst paedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, testify from prison to the child abuse royal commission.

Screen grabs from the Royal Commission Live hearing with priest Gerald Ridsdale pictured. 27 May 2015.

It was chilling last week watching Australia’s worst paedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, testify from prison to the child abuse royal commission.

At 81, he looks more like a benign old man than the evil predator who raped hundreds of children.

But of course paedophiles never look like monsters, and the fact Ridsdale admitted his crimes means we can learn from him, says crown prosector Margaret Cunneen, SC.

“Paedophiles are almost the last people to plead guilty. [But] because he is honest — even though he is so flawed, and responsible for such damage to so many children — we can learn a lot from a witness like Gerald Ridsdale,” she says.

Risdale himself was sexually abused as a child. “I have heard this before from the odd honest paedophile ... I have long held the belief that many perpetrators were victims themselves. That is the real danger, the real evil, because that sort of activity is stamped on their adolescent sexuality, and that becomes their model of sexuality for the rest of their lives.”

Cunneen has special insight into the crime, having locked up Australia’s worst paedophiles: Robert “Dolly” Dunn, Philip Bell, Colin Fisk and Michael Guider. She was also special commissioner into child sex abuse allegations in the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle. She has fought to bring paedophilia out of the shadows that protected perpetrators. A decade ago she urged the public release of a video showing Dolly Dunn putting a little boy to bed, in an obscene parody of a loving father because, even in the 1990s, many people “still did not believe that paedophilia ever happened.”

“Many people on juries just could not believe that men could do this sort of thing to children.

“Because of the advent of videos we finally started having incontrovertible evidence that these things did happen and now I think it’s widely accepted in the community. That had to change because It helped to hide paedophiles. If parents, for example, didn’t believe that priests or other men could do it, the kids had no chance of disclosing and being accepted and supported.”

As unpleasant as the graphic revelations emerging from the royal commission are, it’s crucial to listen, because the naïveté of adults in the past betrayed children.