Intersex Human Rights Australia

What can be said in the face of this?

I heard many rumours about this kind of thing going on in Western Australia for years, where many Irish Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy, and nuns from other orders, run boarding schools.

My own mother was in the care of nuns, in another state. She was taught that children are born evil, and must be flogged daily to within an inch of their lives. She practised physical and psychological violence, as she was taught.

How much of this has been going on all over Australia? Just down the road from where I live is a church-run boys’ high school notorious for the suspected pedophilia of members of its teaching staff. Arrests keep occurring.

When I lived in rural Western Australia, I knew of a number of priests who had things going on with local boys. I met boys who had run away from rural schools run by Christian Brothers – they were some of the most screwed up individuals I have ever met. They told me stories of Brothers raping and beating boys so violently it was hard to believe one human being could do such things to another. Now, I know better.

Will a Commission into these things be set up here? I certainly hope so.

At least the long, great silence has been broken now, but the evil that was hatched in Ireland long ago spread all across the planet and especially to here in Australia.

One commentator has written:

As the Holocaust survivor and Nobelist Eli Wiesel has said: ‘what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.’