Apologies are cheap for those who claim under National Redress Scheme

Just over a month ago, the federal parliament sat to offer formal apologies to the victims of institutional child sex abuse. Professional speech writers honed their craft tapping out flowery words of regret. Professional politicians delivered the words powerfully. The prevailing message to victims was that their stories of appalling sexual abuse had finally been believed.

Many victims gathered in Canberra, others watched on television around Australia, some unsure about the symbolism of national apologies, others certain the apologies would be hollow.

The apology caravan has moved on, leaving victims to work their way through the National Redress Scheme, a system of compensation and support for victims who have suffered largely in silence for decades.

The framework for the National Redress Scheme was put in place by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses before going through the great Canberra sausage machine with the states and territories and the guilty institutions themselves all putting in their two bob’s worth.

The maximum compensation suggested by the Royal Commission of $200,000 was reduced to $150,000. The matrix for determining an amount to be paid has also been changed. Those able to receive the maximum amount must have suffered what is described in ugly bureaucratese as “penetrative abuse.”

There is a view among some in the community the compensation is easy money, but this is misplaced. The National Redress Scheme was designed for two reasons, to make claims for compensation relatively easy, to spare victims the stress of common law claims. Secondly and most importantly, the National Redress Scheme was created largely to avoid a major bottleneck in our legal system.

If there was an intention to make the business of seeking compensation less painful for victims, it has been roughly defenestrated.

The National Redress Scheme commenced on July 1 this year. As of a month ago, the number of claims paid out had not exceeded ten. People are dying, waiting for the institutions to complete the paperwork. Many institutions have not signed on, those that have can drag their feet in processing claims.

These might be seen as teething problems, hopefully rectified as we move forward but in these early days, the effect for victims is devastating, the process retraumatising and the waiting interminable.

As it stands, the claim form runs to more than thirty pages. The form is an ugly hybrid, a match of insurance company jargon with some pseudo-psychological questions thrown in for good measure. Many victims struggle with its scope and length.

All parties, governments and relevant institutions have access to the claims, personal details and reports of abuse in detail. There is a profound sense of privacy being invaded and trampled upon.

Offending institutions have been cut too much slack. They have until 2020 to sign up. Why they have been given so much time is unclear. Many of the leaders of these institutions left the Royal Commission heads bowed after offering humbling apologies. Now it seems as if the humility has changed to a return of the obstructionism of the past.

To make matters worse, there is an inherent discrimination against one group of victims that makes the process more difficult for them than others.

David is 63 and he lives in Ballarat. When he was six-years-old he was made a ward of the state. His single mother, mired in poverty, was unable to cope with raising David and his siblings. He remembers being told he was going for a day at the beach. Rather he was dispatched to St Paul’s Training School for Boys at Phillip Island in Victoria, a home administered by the Anglican Church. By that stage he was a ward, a child essentially owned by the state.

Around six months later he was sexually assaulted for the first time after being placed in a foster home over the Christmas period.

He was shanghaied around a number of institutions and fell under a number of jurisdictions.

He was sexually assaulted again when he was nine years of age while he was a resident in the Salvation Army’s Boys’ Home in Box Hill in Melbourne’s east.

Like so many victims, when he reported his abuse, he was punished by being shipped off to yet another home and effectively incarcerated there for a period of time while the storm blew over. He reported the sexual assault to police but was not believed. After being returned to Box Hill Boys’ Home, the abuse continued.

His tormentor worked at the Box Hill home. The man was a prolific sexual abuser of children, a number of his victims came forward at the Royal Commission. The victims’ stories were finally believed, and the Salvation Army apologised. Now the Salvation Army quibbles that the abuser was not an officer within their order. David remembers it differently being obliged to call the man by his Salvation Army rank of sergeant.

David says he was “stoked” when the Royal Commission was announced. He is less enthused today. He believes the Royal Commission did good work, providing a forum for victims to tell their stories and at last would be listened to.

Now, he has spent nine hours with a counsellor completing his compensation form and is only two thirds of the way through it. He finds the process confronting and retraumatising. The nightmare images of the abuse he suffered as a small boy have returned at night.

Unlike a victim who, for example, may have suffered abuse at a school, David’s claim will be bounced around multiple institutions and jurisdictions. As he was a ward of the state, his claim involves the State of Victoria, the Anglican Church and the Salvation Army at a minimum.

I know of another former ward of the state whose claim will have to be signed off by five separate institutions and two state jurisdictions. This is not uncommon given wards of the state were routinely passed around from one institution to another. Inevitably former wards will have to wait longer for claims to be processed.

To further compound the difficulties with his claim, David was found guilty of a criminal offence as a young adult. The offending was at the lower end of the scale. Nevertheless, he received a prison sentence, and this may extinguish his claim under the rules imposed by government.

It is well to remember that wards of the state are statistically more likely to clash with the criminal justice system as adults. There is a long and lamentable history of it. In David’s case it was an aberration and considering the abuse he suffered at such a young age, his offending could have been much worse. Four decades later, he has not reoffended, but his cards are marked, and his claim may come to nothing.

He and others like him may still contemplate redress in the courts but the process itself is costly, a form of punishment, long and drawn out, often unnecessarily by the defendant.

The civil system has its own form of discrimination against former wards where the defendant may seek to reduce damages by claiming former wards’ parents contributed to the negligence that arose around their children’s lives.

It is another form of procedural unfairness cast upon a group of people who started out in life facing more hurdles than rest of us. As one former ward told me, “Our parents may not have been perfect, many were stuck in poverty traps or suffered mental illness, but they didn’t sodomise us.”

It was not supposed to be this way. The Royal Commission offered the hope that the great suffering endured by so many could in some small way be put right. That hope is being replaced by a sense of pessimism and anger. If they didn’t already know it, victims are learning that official expressions of regret are cheap.

It may yet be possible to put the National Redress Scheme back on track and serve claimants in a more efficient manner. Reviews are set to occur throughout the scheme’s ten-year life. Government needs to act but it will only act where there is significant noise.

This column was published in The Australian 5 December 2018