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NZ Herald
March 30, 2002
Sexual abuse payouts naive, foolish
by Gordon McLauchlan
The decision to allow the ACC to pay lump sums in
compensation to people whose lives have been blighted by what is loosely
called sexual abuse is a folly that signposts trouble ahead for the
organisation.
The level of naivety behind this move was demonstrated by a Cabinet minister
and a counselling doctor (presumably a physician) who publicly said they
couldn't imagine someone applying for compensation with spurious motives.
They must both have led very sheltered lives.
One problem is defining "sexual abuse". Another is the inference
that in any form it must essentially be permanently more emotionally
crippling than all other abuses that scar childhood, an inference possible
only in a society with a deeply puritan tradition.
All our lives are blighted in some way by trauma in childhood - some, of
course, much more than others - but the measure of our adulthood is how
bravely and constructively we recover from it. The most common inhibition to
recovery is a lingering, haunting sense of victimhood. Sexual abuse -
depending on exactly what it is - may be one form of deep hurt from which we
take time and perhaps help to recover; and anyone with an intuitive
imagination will know that a father sexually using a daughter is the ultimate
breach of human trust from which it would take a woman an extraordinary
resilience to regain emotional equilibrium.
But if sexual assault of children is worth recompense, what about
compensation for the long-term psychological damage wreaked by brutal parents
inflicting pain and shame on their children with straps and sticks and
persistent verbal abuse?
Year-in-year-out violence against a child may leave even deeper scars than
sexual wounds, and probably does more lasting social damage from generation
to generation.
I know it's unfashionable to suggest that poverty is of any concern to anyone
but the impoverished, so it would be spitting into the wind for me, I
suppose, to suggest that children permanently damaged by poverty and neglect
should equally be entitled to compensation from the community that let it
happen.
Interesting, though, that a society should put its hand up with collective
guilt where sex is involved but accept none for any other form of damage
inflicted on the lives of our children, not even when mindless violence is
the besetting problem.
Common sense would suggest we spend our money not on an ever-expanding range
of social woes but on bids to prevent abuse in its many forms, on campaigns
to severely punish those guilty of wilfully harming the most vulnerable among
us, and on urging the afflicted that nothing is insurmountable given the love
and support of others, and nothing is gained by assuming the permanent role
of victim.
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