JohnB Australian Press Fails Survivors of Child Abuse

There is a subset of people in the child abuse survivor community, that subset is those who were not believed or had their process blocked through failure or not being taken seriously. The places in our community where those failures occur is not limited to Catholics and the Catholic Church. The Australian Press plays a large role in that process.

The press appears to focus on the fact that many never before survivors have been disclosing; I get to wonder why on occasion the press follows the lines it does. This causes me to wonder about the issue of confirmational bias amongst the press and how that may restrict the public conversation to those things the reporter or their string puller gets to push the preferred line - the current populist SPIN.

The example I see today comes on the one hand a bishop releasing a new book and promoting an online petition to the pope in the hope that that will in some way cause the church to halt and to get together to fix the problems and then we would all be on our knees praying our thanks to the work of god. For me it is a fanciful notion of a small group of Catholics who resort to use the plight of the survivors to push their particular view of a solution now that at long last they have recognised that there is an urgent need for one.

Anyone who has watched a poll over a period of heavy promotion (and believe me this one is having that) will tell you that this one will not get off the ground easily despite making more than 500 publishing across the world over the past few days the petition is yet to reach 20,000 beginning from a base of 15,000 stated in the press release.

Hopefully the world is saying that it is wishful and fantastic thinking to believe that it is possible to rebuild or to repair something that is so entrenched in their demand to  control the thinking of children and is willing to provide a life of permanent blackmail in order to achieve that perpetual control. The only benefit that could come out of it would be for it to go feral and to pull a million signatures simply so they could collectively watch the church self destruct due to its inability to release their control of children and on into their adulthood.

In the meantime Cathy Kezelman from ASCA was published re her concerns about the quality of service and the professionalism coming from the Royal Commission. Now here is something that is of genuine concern for the many survivors wanting to contact the commission and yet not a single major newspaper picks up the story. Now it is obviously not as a result of not being aware as I personally emailed this and got a response from the Daily telegraph designated reporter to the Royal Commission Janet Fife-Yeomans who responded to my email with "Thanks for your amazing email. Do you have a telephone number where I can call you?".

While the press has time to spin on what is essentially an internal church matter where a group is seeking internal reform and on the other hand there is the psychological well-being of the survivor/victim, their treatment and the need for professional and experienced staff to ensure a caring and responsive atmosphere follows them during their engagement with the Royal Commission. It appears this aspect of the plight of the survivor/victims does not interest the press of Australia as they are more concerned over the need to fix and obviously broken church and are quite willing to engage in spruking of the horrible cost to survivors as a line of spin in their sales pitch for this petition.

The blatant use of the plight of survivors to promote religious ideals and actions in the media in preference to the real needs of survivors.

In fact this abandonment and reluctance or refusal by the press to be fair and representative on this issue creates for victims and simply uses the plight of survivors to distract from the real needs of the survivors.

As a matter of course one would expect the Church to be vociferous in speaking out on behalf of the victims and vigorous in ensuring that the government applies the best that science and the law can bring to bear on this issue.

Perhaps it is time to check in with your friendly reporter or a contact whose has an avenue to a reporter to ask how their story on the real needs of survivors is going or do they intend to continue to spin up the fantasies of the religious.

JohnB
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