To: Senator Jan McLucas, chair of Australian parliamentary inquiry into abuse of children in foster care

Senator McLucas

As a survivor of a Christian Brothers boys high school, in Canberra, I am pleased to see news of your report on abuse of foster children under institutional "care." However, I do have to say that it continues to appal me that bodies that perform these kinds of studies express surprise at the findings of abuse of many kinds, over many years. What, really, do these investigators expect? Are they so clueless about the reality of church treatment of children over the centuries that they find abuse a surprise? In which schools, boarding schools, orphanages, and other church institutions have they ever NOT found comprehensive abuse? It would be helpful, I think, if you and other well-intentioned and now well-informed public figures would take a broad-scope view of what has been found - and what has been well known to childhood victims, all along - and came out with some categorical statements that might begin to convert the public from wishful and willful ignorance to some kind of enlightenment. For example, you might say that the Catholic Church has a centuries-long record of abuse of children in all its institutions, and a similar record of harboring, and by self-serving perverseness accommodating, Catholic pedophiles, physical abusers, sadists, and deviants, both ordained and lay, and that it has consistently and brutally suppressed children's reports of its crimes. Anything less than this kind of categorical statement is the kind of piecemeal finding that permits the churches to continue to dodge full responsibility for its organized deviance and cavalier destruction of the lives of those whom they ensnare.

Sincerely,