My Sister’s Secrets podcast hears shock confessions of a child molester

Virginia Tapscott interviews a man who was both predator and prey in a new episode of our gripping investigative podcast.

Sitting there, talking to his younger sister for the first time in decades, Alan* desperately wanted to reach out and comfort her; to reassure her that the abuse he’d inflicted since she was a preschooler had been out of some misguided concept of love.

He wanted her to know he was not a monster.

But listening to her talk and seeing the way she flinched whenever he moved in her direction, he knew that was not true and that he had hurt her beyond repair.

“I thought at the time that I loved my sister,” he tells The Australian’s investigative podcast My Sister’s Secrets.

The podcast is investigating the life and death of vet Alexandra Tapp, who died by overdose in 2020 after disclosing to her sister, Virginia Tapscott, she had been abused by two men in their own family.

In episode seven, released today, Tapscott interviews child sex offender Alan to try and understand what makes abusers prey on children, and how they might be prevented from acting on their impulses.

“I wanted to say those thing to her … but it was really important it was about her and her right to say whatever she wanted to say: how traumatic it was for her, just how it made her feel, that she felt she had no choice and that it wasn’t something that she liked at all,” Alan said in the podcast.

“She was upset, obviously but she wasn’t aggressive to me. At the end, she ended up saying to me, ‘I was thinking that you were just a monster but now I understand.’ And she shook my hand.

“It wasn’t forgiveness … you know, she doesn’t forgive me. And that’s okay … but it was a sense of acceptance.”

He says he knows it is probably more than he deserves: he had sexually abused his little sister for years from the age of about four.

The man, who cannot be named to protect his sibling’s identity, says there is no excuse for what he did.

However, he wants people to understand the underlying causes for his actions – not to forgive him – but to create greater awareness of what drives predators in the hope it can help break the vicious cycle of sexual assault and prevent others being abused in the future.

He says his predatory behaviour was born of the sexual abuse he suffered as a tearaway teenager after being sent to an all-boys reform school.

“My father passed away when I was three and my mum ended up marrying my stepfather and having two more children,” he tells My Sister’s Secrets.

“As a kid, I had lots of, I guess, behavioural problems and issues like that and (my parents) contacted child safety and said, ‘We can’t cope with just this behaviour. We need help.’

“That led to me going into care and then I just went from foster home to foster home until basically there were no foster homes left in the area where I was living and I was sent to BoysTown.”

The notorious residential school, set up in Beaudesert, about 70km south of Brisbane, was run by the De La Salle Brothers between 1961 and 2001, when it was permanently shut.

Catering almost exclusively to disadvantaged boys in their early teens, it has the unenviable distinction of producing the highest number of child sexual assault allegations against any Catholic institution in the country.

As a student there in the mid-90s, the man says he was among those subjected to unimaginably “violent sexual, physical and emotional abuse.”

“I was abused by a number of the Catholic brothers and also gang-raped by a number of all the boys that were at the home,” he says.

“And, you know, as a young man or a young boy, I was really confused and I didn’t have anyone in my life that I could talk about it with and that I could trust. So I didn’t talk to anyone about it.

“I don’t want to downplay the harm that I caused in any way, the things that ended up happening between myself and my younger sister. And I think part of that was trying to understand what had happened to me and trying to understand what sex was. And what love was.

“I thought at the time that I loved my sister, that it was, you know, that there was stuff about love. It was something that, you know, I didn’t understand.

“She must have been about three or four. She couldn’t say no and I didn’t have a concept of that. I knew that if she said no or I don’t want you to do that I know that I wouldn’t have forced her to do anything.

“But (deep down), I think I knew that it was wrong. I would say to her, ‘Look, this is our secret. We don’t tell anyone or I will get in trouble.’ So I obviously knew at some point, at some level that it wasn’t right, but I didn’t really have an understanding of why it was wrong.”

In the My Sister’s Secrets podcast, he reveals how the sexual abuse eventually came to light after he moved in with a foster family and began assaulting his younger foster sister as well; how he eventually confessed to his crimes and his determination to seek treatment after contemplating killing himself in a bid to prevent him hurting anyone else.

He now believes understanding predators is the only way to protect their would-be prey – and warns parents their children are at greater risk than they could ever imagine.

“It’s not just some stranger walking into a school and kidnapping your kid – It’s usually somebody that is known to the child,” he says.

“The reality is it’s people that we allow into our own homes who are the greatest danger to our children – they’re uncles and fathers and grandfathers – and that’s really frightening.

“So the question is: how do we get the help to those people before they are hurting kids; how do we get them to help so that more kids don’t become victims?

“If we’re not able to be open and honest about what’s going on, then (these predators) are not going to get help … and more kids are going to get hurt.”

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• My Sister’s Secrets is the new investigative podcast from The Australian. Episode 7 is available now in the Podcasts section of our app or at mysisterssecrets.com.au
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