OPINION
I’ve asked it before, and now I have to ask it again: is it time to spit on teachers?
Of course not: like all rhetorical questions, I ask merely for effect. To make a point. And the point is this: the churches have been (rightly) held to account for not just the minority of paedophile priests, but for the religious institutions that sheltered them and covered up their crimes in order to protect their reputations. Reputations which have been irreparably damaged.
So, why haven’t the reputations of schools and hospitals been similarly damaged?
Because, as a Tasmanian commission of inquiry has revealed, horrifying abuses were not just perpetrated by a minority of paedophiles in the system, but enabled by the institutions at every turn. The stories of the abuse of vulnerable children are shocking: the revelations of how authorities allowed them to continue doubly so.
Tasmania’s commission of inquiry has heard shocking stories of failure after failure to address child abuse in the state’s institutions.
Stories of how a paedophile was left to operate inside Launceston General Hospital’s children’s ward, how school children were not believed while predatory teachers were moved to new roles, and about widescale abuse facing youth detainees in a “monster” prison.
Witnesses bravely told their stories over nine weeks of hearings last year, and today commissioners will hand their report – containing thousands of pages across multiple volumes – to the state’s governor.
ABC Australia
These stories are particularly shocking to me, personally, because they’re so close to home. I drive past the children’s detention centre in question regularly. My own children were at the Launceston General Hospital when a serial paedophile nurse was allowed to prey on kids in the children’s ward. Tasmania being the place it is, some of the family names are familiar.
What happened to them – what was allowed to happen – is appalling.
In 2011, Kylee Pearn told the Launceston General Hospital that there was a child abuser working in the hospital’s children’s ward.
She knew the nurse was a paedophile, because years earlier, she had been abused by him.
“I just knew I had to do something… I felt he was a risk on that ward,” she said.
But Tasmania’s Commission of Inquiry into Government Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard that her complaint went nowhere.
James Geoffrey Griffin continued to work on Ward 4K for another eight years, racking up more and more complaints until he was finally charged by police.
ABC Australia
That Griffin – who was never brought to justice, instead taking his own life – was allowed to prey on children for years after alarm bells were sounded is a damning indictment on the institution that protected him.
For years, James Geoffrey Griffin worked as a registered nurse at the Paediatric Centre at the Launceston General Hospital (LGH), on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry and at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre. He also worked as a massage therapist for children’s sporting teams…
Griffin died by suicide on October 19, 2019, and the coroner noted he had “made admissions” to police, and forensic searches of his home “located a significant amount of child exploitation material”.
An internal Tasmanian police review found the first allegation against Griffin was made in 2009 and there were issues with information sharing between agencies, such as child protection and police.
ABC Australia
Those allegations included multiple parents telling the hospital that Griffin had abused their children. Some demanded that he not be allowed near their children again, “but nothing really changed”. Parents were summoned to meetings with hospital management, and told their children weren’t really abused.
It wasn’t just the hospital system, though.
As I’ve reported before, inquiries have exposed the state’s school system sheltering multiple predators. Just like the churches, many were shuffled around the system. The first priority always seems to be to protect the institutional reputation.
[Sam Leishman] was a 12-year-old student at New Town High when he was repeatedly sexually abused by a teacher he admired, Darrel George Harington, in the late 1970s.
When other boys at the school found out he was spending time with Harington, one said to him: “How did it feel to suck Harington’s cock last night?”
In other words, that Harington was a paedophile was common knowledge – and not just among students.
“A few days later, one of the other teachers in my school took me aside, and the words effectively were, ‘I don’t know what’s going on between you and Mr Harington, but obviously something is and you need to make it stop’,” Mr Leishman told the commission.
“You were given the responsibility of stopping it?” commission president Marcia Neave asked.
“Yes,” Mr Leishman replied.
ABC Australia
The same story repeats too often across the school system.
As a year 9 and 10 student in the 1990s, Katrina Munting was sexually abused by one of her teachers. She’s now a teacher herself because “for every one person like me, there was one less person like him”.
Kerri Collins was sexually abused as a seven-year-old by her then-teacher. She says while she had the support of her family, “the system hasn’t ever believed me”.
ABC Australia
Rachel* was groomed and sexually abused by a high school teacher in Tasmania. When Rachel’s mother noticed some of the teacher’s inappropriate behaviour on a sporting trip in the mid-2000s, she made a complaint.
Investigations went on for two years before Rachel felt able to tell investigators the full story of the abuse, which went much further than her mother had realised […]
“The [education] department officials came to my mother and said that she was not allowed to talk about this case otherwise she could be sued for defamation,” Rachel told the commission.
Police also told them that he couldn’t be charged because they’d waited too long to come forward. Still, the education department must surely have been on notice that there was a paedophile in their ranks. So, what did they do?
Later she saw a notice published in a newspaper that Wayne had not breached the state service code of conduct and had taken up another position.
ABC Australia
And on it goes.
And then there’s the house of horrors I drive past nearly every week.
A former child detainee at Tasmania’s only youth detention centre tells an inquiry he was made to perform sexual acts on guards in exchange for his ADHD medication.
Stealing a bag of chips – that was the crime that would land Erin in Tasmania’s Ashley youth prison, a place where she would be sexually abused, punished if she complained, and taught that it was better just to shut up and accept it.
ABC Australia
To give an idea of the scale of institutional abuse that was covered up and enabled, the commission of inquiry has referred more than 100 people to Tasmania Police and child protection.
So, where has been the wall-to-wall coverage? The Tasmanian arm of the ABC has covered the story commendably, giving a voice to victims that too many in authority tried to silence. But the national arms of the broadcaster? Which, remember, ran extensive and lengthy daily reports on clerical abuse during the Gillard-era royal commission. Where are the books from ABC journalists, such as were published to smear the late Cardinal George Pell?
It seems that, in too many sections of the media, the pall of silence that enabled these crimes continues in another form.
Apparently, if there’s not a priest involved, they’re not interested.
*Not her real name.