Well meaning but … the Royal Commission that trampled on protections of the innocent

In April 2015, eight months before Frank Valentine would be interviewed by police and four years before his 2019 trial for sexual assault of teenage girls in the early 1970s, his wife Maris Valentine BA completed a thorough report exposing flaws in the relevant processes of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Child Sexual Abuse. It was that RC which named him as a perpetrator which ultimately led to him being charged and finally convicted – and eventually imprisoned for 22 years, cut short by his death five years into his sentence. 

In the course of research for his new book about the case (to be published later this month), author Andrew L. Urban, sought to examine the Maris Valentine report. It reveals the gross errors that led the 2013 Royal Commission’s processes into failings against the fair application of the rule of law.

In the Abstract at the start of her report, Maris Valentine gives a glimpse how serious factual errors of a defamatory nature infected the Commission’s work.

ABSTRACT

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – Case Study No.7 (Parramatta Girls Training School), examined the testimonies of 16 witnesses who were former inmates at Parramatta GTS. However, this has been done in a one-dimensional way without reference to the experiences of people who were working in the Institution at the time, or of women who had different experiences as girls at Parramatta from those who gave evidence, or of people who had experience with the girls who were inmates at Parramatta and the behaviour many exhibited during the relevant time period. All of this information was available and is necessary.

Too many instances of serious factual errors of a defamatory nature have been uncovered in the records freely available on the Commission’s website. The records have largely been ignored and as a result serious injustices have occurred to some of the alleged perpetrators. A total of five men are involved and perhaps as many as eight men have been defamed. Seven and perhaps eight women are involved.

So many instances of serious factual mistakes of memory have occurred in the testimonies of the witnesses that grave concern exists about the justice of any move to consider totally removing the Statute of Limitations with regard to sexual assault. For the same reason, grave consideration needs to be given to the principle of ‘openness and transparency’ as it applies to the unfettered publication of untested allegations of heinous child sexual assault. Unfortunately, such allegations are too often assumed to be true. Newspapers should not be used as a de facto arm of the law by ‘naming and shaming’.

In order to achieve justice for future victims of child sexual abuse, strategies need to be in place so that early reporting of abuse is encouraged and likely. It is understood that now this is often the case.

The Commission is ethically obliged to restore reputations where possible and to seriously examine its modus operandi for future Public Hearings. The law should not inflict damage on innocent people.

Because the Commission has permitted unnecessary full media publication of alleged perpetrators’ names in the interests of “openness and transparency” the Commission is also ethically obliged to recommend compensation to people whose reputations and health have been damaged by false allegations of child sexual abuse that have occurred as a result of the conduct of this Commission. A false allegation of child sexual abuse is just as serious to the person falsely accused as real child sexual abuse is to the person abused.

# This Report has been written by Maris Valentine with advice from ten others who were employed by the Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare under its various names at the times relevant to this Commission’s brief. None of those ten was the subject of allegations through the Commission.

## I write with experience, amongst many other things, as a former District Officer of the Department, having been employed on three separate occasions between 1967 and 1989 and I have considerable experience dealing with sexually abused girls and often their also abused mothers. I lived in at GTS Parramatta for a week as part of the Residential Care component of the District Officers’ Training Course in 1967 and I was a frequent visitor to the Institution during 1971-3 whilst my husband was employed there in the most junior administrative role of Relieving Deputy Superintendent.