Is moral outrage over sex abuse creating intellectual vigilantism?

IS moral outrage creating an atmosphere of intellectual vigilantism?

Ribbons on the main gate of Knox Grammar in support of abuse victims.

WHEN I was an 11-year-old schoolgirl, one of my teachers was known for inappropriately touching his pubescent pupils. The parents all seemed to be aware of the teacher’s proclivities, but rather than going to the police they simply warned us that we should try never to be left alone with him.

I don’t recall being mishandled by the teacher and although friends have more unpleasant memories of him, none of us thought it was worth raising with the grown-ups. We just got on with our young lives.

Through the years I’ve hardly given that teacher a thought until this week, when a young woman called Lucy Perry told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that 25 years ago she had been indecently assaulted by Ian Paterson, former headmaster of Sydney boys school Knox Grammar.

Perry claims that, when she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl rehearsing for a scene in a school musical, Paterson put his hand on her bottom and touched her genitals.

She reported the alleged indecent assault to police in 2009, when five teachers at Knox were arrested, and later convicted, but she didn’t want to bring charges.

Had it not been for the royal commission, her claims against Paterson might have stayed locked away in a police notebook forever. Instead, they have been aired before a national audience and, while she didn’t lay charges, will her evidence to the inquiry succeed in criminalising Paterson in our eyes? He has strenuously denied the allegations, but how many of us will ignore those denials and condemn him regardless?

After all, this man, who was charged with protecting the boys in his care, admitted earlier this week that he had covered up an allegation of sexual abuse by a teacher; yesterday, he withdrew this admission. The inquiry also has heard that in the 1980s and 90s he went to other lengths to protect pedophile teachers. If Paterson is guilty of a cover-up, the logic goes, mightn’t he also be guilty of the alleged sexual assault on Perry? Doesn’t he deserve all the opprobrium we can throw at him?

Those same people also may deem my old teacher’s actions monstrous and condemn the silence that surrounded them. They may be right. The old culture of sil­ence that muffled the ­voices of so many children has given way to one of openness, so we now expect families to go to police immediately when abuse is suspected.

But are we judging yesterday’s actions by today’s enlightened moral code? Are we allowing the justified moral outrage engendered in us by the commission to create an atmosphere of such intellectual vigilantism that we’ll ignore justice in favour of an overwhelming desire to punish anyone who has been accused of abuse, regardless of the facts? Has our sense of fair play given way to one of retribution?

Last week, while the commission was hearing evidence about abuse at Knox, solicitor Greg Walsh was in a Sydney courtroom attempting to address a judge on behalf of his client, who had just been convicted of sexually abusing children in his care.

As he spoke in mitigation of the convicted pedophile, the courtroom erupted in contemptuous laughter. “One juror stormed out, others were holding hands with victims’ mothers,” he says. “All they wanted was retribution.”

The royal commission has opened our eyes to the extent of the abuse that has poisoned so many of our institutions. It has given adult victims the voice that was denied them as children and has put sexual abuse on the table to be discussed instead ignored.

“It’s become a national conversation,” says Hetty Johnston, founder and chief executive of the child abuse support group Bravehearts. “We can’t hide away from it any more.”

Incidences of child abuse in this country are high: the Institute of Criminology puts unofficial estimates as high as one in four girls and between one in seven and one in 12 boys, and there is relief that their stories are being heard.

But Johnston puts her finger on an issue that is exercising many people, both in the judiciary and among those who care for victims. “There’s been a pendulum shift,” she says. “We’ve swung from being oblivious about the issue to hypervigilance. We’ve skipped the common sense in the middle.”

By hypervigilance, Johnston means the new fear, particularly among men, of being accused wrongly of abuse because of innocent actions; the fear that has seen the number of male teachers drop dramatically, that stops a man from helping a child in the street.

Michael Carr-Gregg, adolescent psychologist and managing director of the Young and Well Co-operative Research Centre, says this hypervigilance has led to what he calls the “wussification” of a generation of children. “It ties into the zeitgeist among my clients’ parents that the world is a terrible place and no one’s to be trusted,” he says.

But there’s another fear, that the pendulum has shifted too far, that any man accused of sexual abuse won’t get a fair hearing, that an accusation is as good as a conviction. “There’s a really awful climate in relation to sex abuse cases today,” says Walsh. “The climate is now so pervasive that it’s very hard for anyone to get a fair trial.”

Walsh, who is suing the police on behalf of Stephen Black, jailed for 10 months in 2012 after a false accusation of child sex abuse, believes some police officers are so determined to be seen to be taking victims’ claims seriously that they don’t investigate cases assiduously enough or use questionable methods to obtain a prosecution.

He’s also concerned that men accused of historical abuse may not get a fair trial because of the difficulty of defending actions that happened decades ago.

This isn’t to say that those actions are being unfairly judged by today’s moral code, as was sug­gested by Paterson when he told the commission that all that time ago he didn’t know it was a criminal offence for his teachers to touch boys on their genitals.

“Touching boys’ genitals was obviously a crime 20 years ago,” Walsh points out. “But my concern is that these cases are being heard in an atmosphere of moral panic and the risk of miscarriage of justice is pronounced.”

The issue of miscarriages of justice in the area of child sex abuse is fraught, not least because there is a fear that even raising the possibility could damage the credibility of today’s victims, silence them again. After all, it was sil­ence that allowed Rolf Harris to abuse young girls for decades, and for British personality Jimmy Savile, possibly the world’s most prolific pedophile, to get away with his crimes for so long.

But it is a concern. In Britain, a 2002 Home Affairs Committee report into the conduct of investigations into past cases of institutional abuse found “a new genre of miscarriages of justice has arisen from the overenthusiastic pursuit of these allegations”.

It found unease within the judiciary about police methods of “trawling” for information and “deep concern” over the conduct of police interviews with witnesses, including contamination of evidence by police.

The concerns are increasing here, too. Psychologist Gerard Webster says he is worried about the “dangerous development” he has seen in some of the methods used by police. “They are trying to make sure that the identified perpetrator is called to account and punished,” he says. “There is a lot of pressure on juries and on judges to show leadership in taking a hard line on (sexual abuse) cases.”

Webster, who counsels victims and perpetrators of abuse, warns: “We are at risk of an overcorrection. A different set of people may be having their rights viol­ated, and when individual’s rights are violated the whole of society suffers.”

In Britain, such concerns led to new police guidelines for the investigation of historical institutional abuse and multi-agency guidelines for complex cases.

Those I spoke to in Australia are also in favour of new guidelines, although Carr-Gregg cautions victims must be allowed their day in court.

Johnston suggests one answer could be to make professional therapists the first point of contact for victims rather than police.

However, Walsh remains concerned that society’s hardening attitude towards sex crimes will be the overpowering influence on judicial decisions. “In court, I hear from the Crown (prosecutor) all the time now: ‘You’re never going to beat this,’ ” he says.