Victims struggle for help while $10m spent on child abusers’ non-offending family members
The Commonwealth of Australia has issued a tender for support services for non-offending family members of child sex abuse perpetrators. The winner of the tender will be announced later this month and will receive almost $10 million to provide telephone and online counselling services, including directions to existing health resources.
It’s so difficult to comprehend, it may well require a repeat of what is set to occur. One service provider will receive millions of dollars of Commonwealth funds to provide support services via telephone counselling to family members of a pedophile. Not the primary victims of the pedophile, but non-offending family members of the pedophile.
This is especially galling to victims of child sexual abuse, many of whom have had grave difficulties accessing government services under the National Redress Scheme established in the wake of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. There is, for example, no Commonwealth funding for support groups specifically for male victims of institutional child sexual abuse. Not one.
How did this happen? The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivered its report to the Governor-General in December 2017. The report contained a number of recommendations. Governments, state and federal, including the Turnbull government and the Opposition under Bill Shorten said they would implement all of the royal commission’s recommendations.
In the final report, the royal commission had a section on secondary victims. But as far as I can see, the commission did not advocate for the services that are now being offered by Commonwealth tender. That came later when a National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse (2021-2030) was finalised in September 2021. Among a raft of measures designed to support actual victims, there it appears.
This is bipartisan stupidity. The Morrison government implemented the National Action Plan and it continues under the Albanese government with wholehearted endorsement.
What started as little more than a thought bubble from the royal commission then found monetary form by way of a grant of $10.2 million which was approved in 2021-22. Some of the money has been spent (more than $1 million) in what is loosely called research so that substance was created from the airy-fairy recommendations and now, the remaining money from the $10.2 million grant will now be handed to a company or not-for-profit to provide support services to what can only be charitably described as secondary victims.
What is extraordinary is that no one – no minister or senior bureaucrat over the course of three governments – Turnbull, Morrison and Albanese, thought this was a bad idea and put a stop to it.
To be certain, the $10.2 million is money separate from the national redress scheme. The reality is that this money stands alone rather than taken from primary victims’ support and compensation. But the perception outweighs the reality because the national redress scheme has been shambolic for so many actual victims. Leonie Sheedy from the Care Leavers’ Australasia Network – a support group for people who suffered abuse as wards of the state in orphanages, foster care and children’s homes, estimates that there are almost 100 members from within her group still waiting for redress.
Redress is not simply compensation but a successful applicant will have essential counselling services rolled out to them. For those found to be ineligible under the NRS, there are no services, and government quietly closes the door on them. Not that these people weren’t abused but they just don’t tick all the boxes under the NRS.
In speaking to victims, the overall sense was one of disbelief. One victim, Rob Anderson – who was abused by a teacher, Neil Futcher at Sydney’s Trinity Grammar School at camps Futcher organised when Anderson was aged 12 – thought at first that it was government funding for the children of victims of child sex abuse which would make more sense. I had to explain to him that it was money potentially for the people related to his tormenter.
He was left feeling “sick and numb”. Anderson’s schoolmates who were also victims were left incredulous. The prevailing question was why? In 2017, Futcher received an 18-year-and-four-months jail sentence.
The notorious priest, Gerald Ridsdale stands as the current titleholder of Australia’s worst sex offender on convictions alone. His family will be subject to government-funded comfort. One of Ridsdale’s victims, Stevie Blacker, said the funding of support services to non-offending family members of pedophiles was, “a kick in the guts for all of us who did the right thing and went to court and put these bastards in prison. It makes me sick.”
Blacker went further when I explained the trigger for the funding mechanism. “You can’t understand it. It’s idiocy.”
Clare Leaney, the CEO of the In Good Faith Foundation, which provides support for victims of sexual abuse, said: “Currently, we have survivors and their loved ones struggling to access services due to the incredible demands placed on support agencies. Any additional government funding being made available needs to prioritise resourcing victims and their families, not individuals in the orbits of offenders.”
I appreciate that it might be traumatic for a spouse or a child to discover that their parent, usually the father, is a child sex offender. There is at least one group doing that now without funding, staffed presumably with volunteers. They will be directing non-family members of abusers to existing government services.
That’s the point. These services already exist in one shape or another. Now they have a $10.2 million dollar publicly funded price tag. Will the government now fund support services for non-offending family members of convicted murderers? Armed stick up men? Where does it end? “My husband is a pedophile.” Let’s face it, no one is buying that T-shirt.
Perhaps we should expect governments to act judiciously rather than offer a media grab of “We will accept all of the recommendations of the royal commission” virtually unseen as the Turnbull government did in 2017. Then Opposition leader, Bill Shorten did likewise at the time. And thus, through the churn of government, a service that is arguably unnecessary and triggering to actual victims of child sexual abuse was waved through.
I’ll leave the last word on this government-created mess to a victim of another notorious pedophile priest, Paul David Ryan. Ryan has been sentenced to prison on two occasions and currently has a warrant issued for his arrest in the Commonwealth of Virginia for alleged historical offending. In his victim impact statement read to the court, the victim uttered the heartbreaking words of the long-term consequences of child sexual abuse. “I will die a lonely old man.”
When I spoke to the victim, he’d already heard of the rollout of the funds and the tender.
“I felt sick. I pulled off the road when I was told. I didn’t know if I was going to spew or shit myself. Is this ever gonna stop? How many times can you get triggered?”
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Every now and then even this old watcher of government is left mouth agape in shock at the extraordinary waste of resources and the failure to establish spending priorities.