Shameful case of victim-blaming

After the revelations of the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse and Hedley Thomas’s Teacher’s Pet podcast, the attitude of the NSW Education Department to a former schoolgirl groomed and abused by wife-killer Chris Dawson beggars belief. In response to a compensation claim from the woman, the department’s defence, The Weekend Australian reported, argues the schoolgirl had a “share in responsibility” for being groomed because she did not end her relationship with Dawson, and therefore her damages should be diminished. The woman was somewhat at fault, the department claims, for the hurt caused by Dawson’s abuse because she did not tell her parents about the relationship and did not report it to the police and the school.

The defence reads: “To the extent that there was any sexual conduct engaged in by or between the (former student) and Dawson, such conduct was consensual.”

As Shine Lawyers abuse lawyer Sheree Buchanan says, the defence is “completely ignorant of the power imbalance” between a student and a teacher. It also flies in the face of Dawson’s recent conviction for carnal knowledge, for which three years were added to his 24-year sentence for murdering his first wife, Lyn. The defence also ignores the fact that Dawson was twice the girl’s age of 16 when he began grooming her when she was his student at Cromer High School on Sydney’s northern beaches in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other teachers and school officials turned a blind eye, Thomas wrote, when Dawson made the girl his year 11 “lover” and took her to the 1981 school formal, where they sat at the teachers’ table. She later became his second wife and the mother of one of his daughters.

She also became his accuser, showing the courage in 1990 to contact police to report her suspicions that he had killed Lyn.

The department’s legal strategy, for which NSW Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car must be held responsible, is immoral and grotesque.