Aimee says ‘I thought “Who’s going to believe me over this priest, this wonderful man?”’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
A Catholic priest groomed Aimee and her family by offering to give her support with her education.
Looking back, she realises that he isolated her from other people, making it easier for him to sexually abuse her.
When Aimee was around the age of 12, she was having difficulties at school. She was alarmed when a teacher came to her house to talk to her mum.
A little while before this happened, Aimee had been sitting alone outside when a man approached her. They chatted, and the man told her he was a priest. He gave her his card and said if she ever needed to talk he would be there to listen to her.
Aimee continues ‘So that night, because I was so fearful of what was going to happen I went to the priest’s house because I thought I’d be given help. I was brought up a good Catholic. You think priests are there to help so I trusted him’.
The priest, Father A, said he would take Aimee home and talk to her parents. He offered to support Aimee with her school work and he went to meet her teachers. Aimee’s mum and dad were happy with this idea, and Father A became a regular guest in their home, having meals, helping Aimee with her work and making friends with the extended family.
This had been going on for a number of months, when during one visit, Father A asked if he could talk to Aimee alone. She says ‘I remember feeling confused about what it could be’. To her shock, the priest started kissing her. ‘I didn’t know what to do’ she relates. ‘I was not a streetwise [child].’
The following day, Father A told her to come to the priests’ house. She continues ‘He told me what had happened was not wrong because the disciples had wives so a priest should be able to as well’.
From then on, the abuse by the priest escalated. He made Aimee go to his house, and he touched her genitals and asked her intrusive questions about how this made her feel. She remembers that he often became angry because he didn’t get the reaction he wanted. She adds ‘It continued nearly every single day … and I was seen by many different priests every time I went into the house’.
Father A sometimes took her out in his car and sexually abused her. She remembers him sweating profusely.
Aimee now realises that over the previous months, Father A had been gaining her trust and the trust of her family. She says ‘Without realising it, I had cut myself off from other people. It was just him I could go to’. A member of staff at school had been giving her support but Father A had told this person it would make things ‘complicated’ if two adults were helping her.
She adds ‘I was stuck, because I would not have been able to go to anyone with what he was doing’.
After sexually abusing her for about two years, the priest offered to take Aimee on a trip, telling her parents he would show her the sights. She says ‘I was frightened of being alone with him in a big place where I knew no one’. But, she adds that she couldn’t tell her parents she didn’t want to go, because no one would believe that Father A would do anything bad.
Father A arranged for Aimee to stay in a convent on the trip, while he stayed with a couple he knew. During the trip, he made Aimee come to this house, and took her into his bedroom. She remembers him telling off the woman who lived there for coming in without knocking.
Then one morning in the convent, one of the nuns told Aimee that Father A was unwell and couldn’t come for her. She remembers the nuns were very kind and arranged for her to go home to her parents. Looking back, she thinks that the woman at his lodgings had challenged him about what he was doing with Aimee.
After this, Father A was sent away. Aimee says she was relieved, but he continued abusing her. He wrote her letters containing sexual references, saying they should never be apart. She hid these.
One day the priest telephoned the family home, saying he was back and wanted to come and see them. Aimee describes being so frightened at the thought of seeing the priest that she felt sick. She says ‘I remember feeling horrible that he was hugging me … I sat as far away as I could … I just wanted him to go’.
When Aimee was 16, someone in her house accidentally discovered the priest’s letters and she decided to tell her mother about the abuse. She relates ‘I watched her read them crying. From then on it felt a relief, it was done’.
But, she continues, ‘Mum was a good Catholic’. She showed the letters to another priest in the parish and Aimee says ‘They copied them and used them to their advantage’.
The church offered to support Aimee and her family in any way they wanted. They arranged and paid for Aimee to see a female counsellor every week. On one occasion, Aimee was shocked that this counsellor relayed a message to her from Father A.
Aimee was suffering with poor mental health. Her GP was concerned about this and asked her about the kind of counselling she was having. When Aimee questioned the counsellor, the woman replied that she wasn’t a counsellor, saying ‘I’m someone they brought in for you to talk to’. Aimee says ‘But we were told by the church she was and they were paying her’. She now suspects that this woman passed information to the church, and possibly even recorded the sessions.
Soon after this, Aimee spoke to a social worker who encouraged her to report the abuse by Father A to the police. She gave a statement that took eight hours. The priest was arrested and charged. He pleaded not guilty.
In the ensuing court case, Aimee had to give evidence for an entire day, at the age of 18. She describes a gruelling experience. ‘I was made to look like there was something wrong with my head … .’ She adds that on a few occasions, the judge intervened about the way she and her mother were questioned.
Father A was acquitted.
When she was in her late 30s, Aimee had a mental breakdown. She was referred to a support organisation and started having therapy.
With this support, she contacted the police to request a review of the court case. She has been told that her file is lost, but a detective is persisting in trying to obtain it.
Aimee has met staff at her old school, and discovered information about the way the church put pressure on them and also gave them financial inducement in order to obtain her records before the court case.
Aimee is still devastated by the abuse, the court case and the feeling that people she and her family trusted let her down.
She says ‘It tortures me every single day to think they could do that to a child. It ruined the person I was. They did everything they could to protect the name of the church. These people I absolutely trusted’.
Aimee suffers with depression and says she has never been able to settle with anything, including jobs and relationships, although she has two good friends she trusts completely. She has thought of suicide many times but she says ‘I think of my family and my children and what it would do to them’.
She thinks she may be overprotective of her children, but she says that because the abuse she suffered took place in the 1990s, she believes it could still happen. She adds that she knows she has a good and trusting relationship with her children and they talk to her about their problems and concerns.
Aimee wishes the police had been more thorough when they investigated her case, because they missed things that would have been strong evidence. She would also like barristers to be more accountable for their behaviour and their competence. She stresses the importance of children and young people having people they can talk to, commenting that so many youth centres have been closed.
But she adds, ‘In my case, he took everyone away so I don’t know who I could have talked to. To everyone else he was wonderful and I was just a child with issues’.