Lifting the lid on Australia’s child sex abuse

Melbourne :For decades, Peter Blenkiron remained silent about the abuse he had suffered at age 11 at the hands of his Catholic Christian Brother teacher. Earlier this year, Mr Blenkiron relived the horror of his school days, telling an inquiry into child abuse about how he would be pressed against the wall at the back of the classroom while his teacher physically and sexually abused him, with the other students ordered to look away.”If there was no sexual abuse after the belting, then you knew you’d had a good day,” the 53-year-old told a hearing of Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.Giving testimony from his hometown Ballarat, in regional Victoria, and hearing harrowing stories from other survivors of child abuse brought back the pain, Mr Blenkiron told the BBC.”I was a mess for about two months,” he says.But he was determined to shine a light on the abuse that has claimed the lives of many of his peers, through suicide and substance abuse, and that turned him into “a ticking time bomb”.The Royal Commission is an historic opportunity to draw a line in the sand under that pain, he says.”It has to uncover the horrors of the past, it has to help those who were affected to get the best possible ongoing support today, and it has to make sure all our children are safe in future,” he says.That’s a measure of the huge challenge facing the Royal Commission, set up in 2013 in response to public outrage over allegations the Catholic Church had for years covered up evidence about paedophile priests.The then Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised the investigation into how government and private institutions responded to allegations and instances of child sexual abuse would “change the nation”.The signs are hopeful, with the Commission acting on a scale and scope that few expected, and with a sensitivity to those abused that the UK’s fledgling Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has indicated it may follow.