The other day, I had coffee with a man who shared a grim story about how his life was blown off course by a sexual predator when he was a 14-year-old schoolboy.
The man says he was raped by a teacher at his Sydney high school nearly 50 years ago. The resulting trauma is severe and lifelong, including multiple suicide attempts.
His story, while distressing, is not uncommon. Just this week, this masthead reported on disturbing new research showing that one in 10 men have sexually abused children and teenagers, including online offences.
Many survivors of child sexual abuse only report years or decades later.Credit: iStock
As awful as this is, what truly shocked me was the policy of our own government to grab a share of any compensation payout survivors might receive. Did you know that Medicare, Centrelink and the National Disability Scheme need to be paid from any compensation payment? Me neither.
More on that later, but it brought home how broken the system of victim compensation is, especially for survivors of child sexual abuse.
The size of payouts is a lottery. The National Redress Scheme for eligible child sexual abuse survivors provides a payment from $10,000 to a maximum of $150,000. At the other end of the scale, a Victorian jury recently ordered the Western Bulldogs Football Club to pay $5.9 million to a survivor of child sexual abuse.
Not everyone has a wealthy institution or individual to sue and cases before the courts don’t always go to a jury. (Damages in judge-only trials tend to be lower.)
In this case, the man is suing his former school in the NSW Supreme Court. In September, the school made a settlement offer, obtained by this masthead, for a confidential payout of $1.055 million. The school also asked for a “non-disparagement” clause, with the penalty being half the payout.
The man’s claims have never been tested in court and his alleged perpetrator is dead. Several other men in both NSW and New Zealand made police reports about the same teacher, but the cases never went to trial.
‘Uniquely unfair’: How the government grabs a share of compensation payouts
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21.11.2023
The other day, I had coffee with a man who shared a grim story about how his life was blown off course by a sexual predator when he was a 14-year-old schoolboy.
The man says he was raped by a teacher at his Sydney high school nearly 50 years ago. The resulting trauma is severe and lifelong, including multiple suicide attempts.
His story, while distressing, is not uncommon. Just this week, this masthead reported on disturbing new research showing that one in 10 men have sexually abused children and........
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