#LetHerSpeak: How abuser Nicolaas Bester haunted Grace Tame’s mum Penny Plaschke at uni

In 2014, the mother of sex abuse victim Grace Tame began a uni degree but was forced to stop attending classes when she discovered her daughter’s abuser was also on the UTAS campus.

Penny Plaschke, the mother of abuse survivor Grace Tame. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

IMAGINE having to sit at home and listen to a university lecture online instead of on campus to avoid the man who was convicted of sexually abusing your daughter.

That was exactly the position Penny Plaschke — mother of Grace Tame, the face of the Let Her Speak campaign — found herself in at the University of Tasmania.

Unaware that convicted sex offender Nicolaas Bester, who repeatedly sexually abused Grace in 2010, was a student at the university, Mrs Plaschke enrolled in a Bachelor of Psychological Science in 2014.

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Bester was jailed in 2011 for his first crime and again in 2016 for bragging about the crime on Facebook.

He was a PhD student at UTAS when he committed the second offence which was deemed to be creating child exploitation material.

An online petition with more than 3500 signatures was handed to UTAS management in 2017, but the university said at the time it believed in “an agenda of participation and the power of education to transform people’s lives”. Mrs Plaschke said she had begun and dropped out of many units since beginning the degree due to Bester’s presence on campus and the fallout from his second crime.

“I pulled out of my units in the second semester last year because I knew we had a clash in timetables and I started resenting the fact I had to stay at home and watch a lecture online on Fridays because he was at uni,” she said.

“I found I felt really uncomfortable on campus and I’d lost the joy of it — I was nervous being on campus the whole time. I couldn’t reconcile the university’s position that he hadn’t breached their code of conduct when he had produced child exploitation material about another student’s daughter.”

Grace Tame with mother Penny Plaschke. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

Mrs Plaschke said she did not have any criticisms of her lecturers and still held the university in high regard.

“The lecturers there have all been totally supportive and they have made allowances where they could to support me through my studies,” she said.

“I think that this decision to allow Bester to remain on campus, that rests with the previous Vice Chancellor Peter Rathjen. The new Vice Chancellor has inherited the problem. Had Professor [Rufus] Black been in charge at the time, I think it would have been a different outcome.”

In a statement to the Mercury, Vice Chancellor Rufus Black acknowledged Grace’s fight to tell her story.

“She has done so with dignity, determination and bravery in the face of obstacles that ought not to have been there,” he said.

“The law that stopped Grace from telling her story, in her name, must be changed. She had to fight too long and too hard for a right that should be afforded to her as a matter of course.

“While their efforts to change the law continue, Grace and her mother Penny Plaschke have already changed our university.

“As I have already expressed to Grace’s family, I am deeply sorry for the ways our actions added to their distress. We were not where we needed to be in terms of how we responded to issues of sexual assault and sexual harassment. We have taken significant strides and made improvements throughout the university, reporting publicly along the way. We have work to do in this space, but our community can be confident that the safety and wellbeing of our students and staff are our priority.”

It was revealed last month Bester had been banned from all UTAS properties since the end of last year following a landmark complaint by End Rape On Campus Australia.

When asked if Bester was still an enrolled student, Prof Black said the university did not respond to queries about individual students.

Mrs Plaschke is back on campus this year, and she’s taking it one semester at a time.

“At the moment, I’ll just be happy to finish my degree,” she said.