Compelling story shines a light

Silence. Secrecy. Shame. These are the weapons of the monsters hiding under our children’s beds. Don’t tell anyone. This is our little secret, or everyone will know you’ve done something wrong. Everyone will know you are dirty.

On Saturday we publish a searing piece of journalism: the first-person account by writer Virginia Tapscott of the sexual abuse she and her elder sister, Alexandra Tapp, endured as children at the hands of their step-grandfather, now dead. Tapscott, 29, is driven by righteous fury — not only at what happened but also at the depth of trauma and despair that drove Alex to overdose on drugs in June at the age of just 33. Alex confided in her sister that she had been raped at the age of 18 by another man, also a close male relative. Neither perpetrator has been held to account. Nor have thousands just like them: the adults who prey on children, safe in the knowledge they’ll never be caught because this is a subject our society just doesn’t like to talk about.

In our age of openness, child sex abuse is one of the last taboos. The great social change of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is the advent of understanding that children have rights: to be free from violence and to have their voices heard. We’ve become familiar, thanks to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, with the accounts of children who were abused in institutions such as orphanages. But abuse within families is still in the shadows. Child sexual abuse cases are notoriously hard to prosecute because victims typically are too afraid or isolated to speak up until many years have passed, by which time perpetrators are often dead.

Victims are constrained, too, by the fear of upsetting the people they love, of fracturing the whole family. Those victims who do make it to a police station confront the stark fact that evidence — the kind of evidence needed to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt — is often non-existent: contemporaneous accounts, diary entries, disclosures to teachers or sports coaches, medical records. That’s precisely because children in abusive households have nowhere to go; nobody to tell. When a perpetrator has parental authority and physical control of a victim, help is out of reach.

If a case by some miracle does make it to trial, a defence barrister will make much of this lack of evidence and suggest the complainant is making it all up. Again, it comes down to the victim’s word against the perpetrator’s. And each time a victim is disbelieved, the message is sent out again to all the other victims: nobody wants to know. Tapscott has had enough of shame. She won’t be silent for one more second. She wants us all to talk about this scourge, to listen to the stories of those who haven’t been believed and to break the spell of secrecy once and for all.