My own personal journey has taught me the hard way, that wherever there are people, there will almost always be predators ready to prey on them.
For me this lesson was delivered at the hands of a brutal bully, in primary school. Later, through my ongoing work with victims of crime, this grim reality was only confirmed further to me.
As stark as this reality may be, what my own experience and that of the victims in the Child Abuse Royal Commission shows us, is that though predators may have always been around, so too have countless numbers of supposedly responsible adults, who could have spoken out at the time of the abuse and by doing so have stopped it in its tracks.
The excuses for staying silent, though at times with some merit, are nowhere near adequate by way of justification. This kind of silence has allowed for completely innocent and defenceless children who were entrusted in their care to remain fodder for their respective predators.
Yet, despite such an awareness, the common message we still continue to drive home to victims – be they those of a school bully, a pedophile, or a wife beater – is that if only they speak up and out, help will come their way.
In my memoir I write of several occasions when I spoke out to those who were in positions of responsibility for my welfare and safety, only to have such pleas ignored. What we are hearing out of this current Royal Commission is even worse, with victims not only being ignored, but in turn actually being blamed for the horrific acts committed against them. Indeed, in some cases, victims who came forward were simply delivered into the hands of other pedophiles, who continued to perpetrate shocking acts of abuse against them.
My ordeal only stopped when I physically refused to step foot in the school again. By that stage, I had asked for help from various members of the teaching staff at least a dozen times, over what was a period of several years. Had just one of these people whom I approached for help given my claims the attention they warranted, I could have been spared the further years of suffering I was subjected to.
I was fortunate to escape any long-lasting physical damage as a result of this experience, but mentally I was not so lucky. The prolonged exposure to a threatening environment saw