Child abuse: How "The Age" fails it readers and encourages prejudice

In printing the article, “How the system failed an innocent and freed a predator” (The Age 10/2/2002) is guilty of prejudice and poor journalism because it fails to probe or question the veracity of its sources, or to analyse the evidence.
Although there are glaring inadequacies in the article’s condemnation of the legal system, I wish to challenge some of the hidden assumptions behind the blame heaped on the educational system.
In this story of rape by a father, obtaining corroboration is difficult and questioning your sources is painful. A good journalist would not consider this a convenient relief from the necessity of hearing the other side, or that tacky process of evaluation, balance and scepticism. But a journalist working for The Age, whose editorial prejudgement on so many issues is so well known, seems to be relieved from this burden. The modern criminal confession is aptly stated by Monty Python - “It’s a fair cop. Society is to blame.”
The story makes untested allegations that seem to be unquestioningly accepted. Blame is attributed to the alleged perpetrator and “the system”. Has the journalist interrogated (i.e. asked probing questions forcefully) or has he/she merely listened credulously - too afraid to be seen as unsympathetic – too afraid to even consider the possibility of exaggeration, faulty memory, or even lying (even to suggest this at The Age is probably to commit the equivalent of modern blasphemy).
Indeed, a list of maxims is printed in bold beside the article without any accompanying critique or analysis: to “be believed” is stated as a victim’s “right”. If the issue was not so tragic and serious, this sort of ludicrous sloganeering would be laughable - but to have it printed unchallenged as advice from a “qualified counsellor” is gross irresponsibility.
All people have rights. No right is unaccompanied by responsibilities. The failure to exercise responsibility can lead to the loss of any of our rights - sometimes through the action of the state, at other times through the action of others or the physical world.
The title of the article blazes forth with “the system failed”. What utter rubbish ! The central failures here, (and there are many !) are those of the family.
If the story is believed completely even in the absence of corroboration, journalistic interrogation or research, the criminal is the father.
The father failed at every test. First, he, with the mother, was responsible for breaking apart a family during the crucial years of childhood thus exposing the children to greatly increased risks of social and educational failure during adolescence and early adulthood.
Second, he was responsible for hideously violating the trust his daughter had a right to place in him.
Thirdly, he was responsible for committing, repeatedly and with premeditation, a crime against society by raping his daughter.
The “system” cannot prevent any particular father from acting in this way. It can only try to catch him early and them punish him in a way that: prevents him from offending in the immediate future by court protective orders, prison, chemical or other treatment (prevention), develops remorse (punishment) and self control (rehabilitation); makes him less likely to repeat in the future (deterrence); provides public warning to others (deterrence).
The mother was jointly responsible with the father for the family break-up. She was also responsible through not developing a relationship with her daughter that would have allowed the abuse to be discovered at an early stage, let alone during the seven years it was being perpetrated. The daughter should have had innumerable opportunities to hint, ask oblique questions, show her mother the draft of an essay etc. etc. The reporter, blinded by incompetence or another unwritten editorial policy of The Age, never asks whether the mother was not too busy with her own trauma from a failed marriage or with her work in the “big organisation” to observe, listen to, and be with her daughter so that intimacies had time to emerge. No, “you (don’t) go over things you could have done” because that would “impact badly on the family”. No, we must not look inward. The family is a tragic criminal failure but surely society is to blame ?
The child was responsible for failing to communicate with her mother. Any parent knows that the lesson, “You should have told me !”, needs to be restated again and again throughout childhood. Children are responsible for their own actions even though the level of their responsibility varies more than that of adults. This story is a warning to children that failure to talk about smaller worries can cascade into an inability to tell about horrendous issues. After failing to tell at first, the child experiences guilt for not telling which grows to match each new worry and requires greater and greater courage to overcome. She is silenced by imagined accusations including: “Why have you let it go on for so long without telling me ? Don’t you trust me ? Don’t you love me ?”.
The teachers in the story are responsible for not reporting that the child had spoken to them about “suicide and harming herself”. This report should have been made to the parent unless there was “ a belief on reasonable grounds” that he/she was part of the problem.
The grossly misleading aspect of the article is the inference in the title that the central failure is that of faceless systems such as the educational system which should have prevented the whole tragedy by knowing more of what goes on in the child’s life than her own mother !
The article is unclear about the sequence of events, but it seems that the teachers and the mother of a friend were the first to act. The abuse may have escalated to rape before any signs of disturbance were seen at school but it was a teacher who reported the matter to the police ! Is this evidence of failure ! What did the mother do when told of “worries” by the friend’s mother ? Anything ?
“And yet from the teachers, there was not one word.” If we use the benefit of hindsight, we may see many things that fit the pattern of behaviour of an abused child. Teachers only have oblique opportunities such as those mentioned in the article to find out intensely personal details if students do not volunteer them to their friends or school counsellors.
If small signs of disturbance had been noticed earlier, teachers (even school counsellors) had a responsibility to tell the parents of what they saw and heard, but this does not extend to suspicions of child abuse unless the teachers “form the belief on reasonable grounds that a child is in need of protection….and (that) the child’s parents have not protected, or are unlikely to protect”.
Unlike many teachers, the reporter seems to have no conception of the trauma involved for a family where a child abuse allegation is made. This trauma occurs whether the allegations are true or not - exaggerated or not. The child has little conception of what will happen when the social services and/or the police are forced to put their regulations into action. The reporter, and unfortunately many of the public who read such drivel, are coming to live in fantasy world where, not only are all allegations true, but also that every child will benefit if every instance if abuse is dealt with through the bureaucracy of social services and the police.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In conclusion, the educational system has a primary responsibility to educate. The early detection of child abuse occurs incidentally but when a “belief on reasonable grounds” is formed, schools must act.
Unless the family is re-established as the first line of social responsibility, we will continue the current spiral into what Robert Hughes describes as the “culture of complaint” where the only people expected to be responsible are those who are paid. Everyone else can safely be a victim.