Andre says ‘I'm sick to death of reading in the papers of another child being abused’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Andre hopes that by sharing his experience he may help to protect other children from abuse.
He was sexually abused over seven years by a Catholic priest who befriended and groomed the whole family to gain access to Andre.
Andre’s parents were devout Catholics, and as a trusted figure in their local church, Father A was frequently invited to their home. The priest also sometimes joined the family on holidays.
The first incident of sexual abuse occurred when Andre was 11 years old. Father A started touching Andre through his nightclothes, and from then on the abuse escalated to touching the boy’s genitals.
Andre says that despite his young age he knew what Father A was doing was wrong, but that he ‘completely froze’ when he was being abused.
He adds that Father A would play ‘mind games’ with him to justify the abuse, even showing him books written by religious scholars indicating it was common for priests to befriend families and have relationships with children. He says ‘I was so screwed up, I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong’.
Father A would also buy Andre lavish gifts or lend him money to buy toys. Andre says the priest always seemed to know what he wanted. He describes it ‘like being stuck in the middle of a spider’s web’.
As Andre got older, the priest began to ply him with alcohol and pornographic material. Andre remembers feeling tormented as a teenage boy about his sexuality and wondering whether he was gay.
Andre says he was an extremely bright child but by secondary school age he was playing the ‘class clown’ in an attempt to block out what was happening to him. He feels he wasted these years and didn’t obtain the grades he needed to gain a place at university. He questions how much more he could have achieved in life if he had not been abused.
As adults, Andre and two more male survivors were involved in a police investigation concerning Father A. The priest died during the course of the investigation.
Andre was awarded compensation following a civil case against the Catholic Church. But, he says, he feels this was a way of getting him to ‘shut up’ and all he ever really wanted was an acknowledgment and apology from the church.
He is happily married with children whom he adores, but he feels that he has needed to ‘put on a veneer’ to the outside world to hide his feelings of guilt and shame. He says not a week goes by without him being triggered in some way, perhaps by a song, a storyline on television or a comment and he is taken straight back to the abuse.
This has led to him feeling insecure and he is frequently quick-tempered. He comments ‘Behind this shell there's this volcano’.
As a father, Andre finds it difficult to understand the naivety shown by his parents, but he adds that he does not blame them because the priest was very clever in his manipulation of the family. He thinks his experiences have made him very protective of his own children.
Andre would like to see a much broader understanding in society of the long-term effects of child sexual abuse on victims and survivors.
He feels that there is hypocrisy within the church over the issue of child sexual abuse and that the church is not sufficiently held to account. His religious beliefs have been completely affected by his experiences and he has little trust in religious leaders. He says ‘I think the church needs to confess more than I do’.
Andre feels that mandatory reporting is ‘the only way’ to try and prevent abuse, along with a designated and independent safeguarding officer attached to each church. He says no priest should be allowed to be alone with a child, to protect both the child and the adult.