Chapter 8 — Patrick Smith

My engagement with the Royal Commission, the first male professional to whom I spoke substantially about abuse by women, and what happened when even that process became difficult to fit.

The Royal Commission

By the time Australia established the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, I had already spent decades trying to make sense of what had happened to me.

I had spoken to institutions.

I had encountered processes in Melbourne.

I had written publicly.

I had also learned that telling a story did not necessarily mean that the story would be understood.

The Royal Commission appeared to offer something different.

It was national.

It had been created because institutional responses to child sexual abuse had failed on a scale that could no longer easily be ignored.

I entered that process carrying a history that did not fit neatly into one category.

Patrick Smith

Patrick Smith became my principal point of contact.

He occupies an unusual place in my memory of those years.

I remember him as amazingly helpful.

That matters because Patrick was the first male professional with whom I was able to speak substantially about abuse I remembered being committed by women.

That part of my history had always been particularly difficult to communicate.

It did not fit the more familiar picture of childhood sexual abuse in which the perpetrator was assumed to be male.

For me, some of the earliest and most consequential experiences involved nuns.

Being able to say that to a man who listened rather than immediately reframing it was significant.

What I Tried to Tell Him

My surviving communications are important because they allow me to see what I was actually trying to explain at the time.

In an email to Patrick dated 12 August 2015, I described childhood experiences involving a priest and two nuns.

I wrote about restraint.

I wrote about a crucifix and oil.

I wrote about rape.

I wrote about repeated events rather than a single incident.

I wrote about being confined in a cellar.

I wrote about threats involving hell, punishment and harm to members of my family.

I also wrote about Herbie and the part he played in making some of what was happening stop.

And I referred to Kevin O'Donnell.

Those communications matter now because they are not reconstructions made for this book.

They are records of what I was trying to tell the Royal Commission in 2015.

Things Missing From the Report

Eight days later, on 20 August 2015, I wrote to Patrick again.

I was concerned that important things I had told him about my early childhood had not appeared in a report that was supposed to have drawn upon information obtained from me.

From my perspective, these were not peripheral details.

They included several events that I regarded as having affected the whole course of my life.

There were also memories involving silence, trust and what I had learned as a child about whether adults could safely be told things.

Once again I encountered a familiar difficulty.

I could say something.

A record could then be produced.

But the record was not necessarily the same thing as what I had said.

Not Fitting

At some stage I came to understand that my circumstances did not fit the Royal Commission's criteria in the straightforward way I had hoped.

There was a technical problem with where responsibility was understood to lie.

That experience was familiar.

I had repeatedly encountered systems whose boundaries made sense within their own administrative definitions but did not necessarily make sense when applied to a life.

I had not spent my childhood living in an orphanage or children's home.

Yet religious institutions, schools, clergy, nuns and other people acting with institutional authority had been deeply involved in the history I was trying to report.

The difficulty was not that institutions were absent.

It was deciding which institutional box the history belonged in.

A Person Inside a Process

Patrick was important to me partly because he remained a person inside that process.

I did not experience him merely as somebody completing a form.

He listened.

He allowed me to speak about material that had been difficult for me to speak about elsewhere.

That did not mean everything became easy.

The act of repeatedly telling childhood trauma can itself have consequences.

I was trying to retrieve events, explain them, relate them to one another and respond to questions about them.

At the same time I was trying to function in the present.

Those two activities did not always coexist peacefully.

When Telling Becomes Harmful

One of the assumptions behind many complaint and inquiry processes is that disclosure is inherently beneficial.

My experience has been more complicated.

There can be value in finally telling something.

There can also be harm in having to tell it repeatedly.

There can be harm when important details disappear from the resulting record.

There can be harm when disclosure produces a referral but the person receiving that referral does not understand the conditions under which the disclosure became possible.

And there can be harm when a process established to listen begins to feel like another institution whose requirements the survivor must satisfy.

The Referral

As my engagement with the Royal Commission developed, I was directed towards psychological support.

That eventually led me into contact with Dr Craig Mattocks.

That referral became another complicated part of my history.

I later developed serious concerns about the treatment I received and about whether what was being done was consistent with what I had sought: trauma-informed, evidence-based and secular psychological care.

I have described aspects of that treatment as aversion therapy carried out without my informed knowledge.

That is my account and interpretation of what occurred.

The records surrounding that period need to be examined separately before I attempt to make a final account of it here.

For the purposes of this chapter, the important point is that a referral intended to support my participation in the Royal Commission did not produce the safe continuation I had expected.

Patrick's Decision

My recollection and understanding is that Patrick eventually refused to continue his Royal Commission contract because of the way my matter had been handled.

That was an extraordinary thing for me to hear.

I had spent much of my life encountering people who could see something was wrong but nevertheless remained inside the structures around it.

Here was somebody whom I understood to have reached a point where he was not prepared simply to continue.

I need to return to the surviving communications before describing the exact sequence more precisely.

But my memory of Patrick is not principally one of institutional failure.

It is of an individual who tried to help me inside an institution whose process ultimately became problematic for me.

The Difference One Person Makes

This distinction has become important in the way I think about institutions.

An institution can fail while individuals within it behave with integrity.

An institution can also point to good individuals without addressing the failures of the system around them.

Those two observations are not contradictory.

Patrick's willingness to listen does not prove that the Royal Commission handled everything concerning me correctly.

My difficulties with the Commission do not erase the value of what Patrick did.

Both belong in the story.

What Happened to Me Afterwards

The period that followed became increasingly complicated.

Psychiatric descriptions entered the history.

There were disputes about treatment.

There were questions about records and what had been passed from one professional to another.

There were later difficulties obtaining legal representation.

There was the National Redress Scheme, which in my circumstances did not appear capable of addressing the scale or nature of the history I was trying to place before it.

And again there was the recurring problem of fitting.

A system might acknowledge abuse but be unable to deal with what I regarded as the consequences of institutional responses to that abuse.

What the Commission Changed

It would be wrong to suggest that nothing changed.

The Royal Commission changed the national conversation about institutional child sexual abuse.

It created places where experiences long denied could be spoken about.

It also forced institutions to confront histories they had previously been able to minimise or contain.

My own experience sits inside that larger achievement without being identical to it.

A process can accomplish something historically important and still fail an individual participant.

That is another example of two things being true at the same time.

The Man I Remember

When I strip away the documents, criteria, referrals and later disputes, the thing I remember most clearly about Patrick Smith is relatively simple.

He listened.

For somebody who had spent much of his life being told that his account was impossible, sinful, dishonest or evidence of something wrong with him, listening was not a small act.

It did not solve the history.

It did not produce justice.

But it allowed me, for a time, to speak about things I had found almost impossible to put into words.

That deserves to remain part of the record too.

Another Layer to Return To

I still have emails from that period.

There are reports.

There are later accounts written while the consequences were still unfolding.

When I return to them, this chapter will almost certainly change.

Dates will become clearer.

Some recollections will be confirmed.

Others may need qualification.

There may be things I have forgotten entirely.

For now, Patrick Smith marks an important point in this life.

He was somebody inside a national process who heard things I had rarely been able to say.

What happened after that would lead me into another long and difficult part of the story.