The scandal of defending George Pell: Amanda Vanstone's moral support

While Vanstone is, in some ways, rightly concerned that others who may have known of cases of abuse and did not report are somewhat invisible while bishops - as the public face of church governance - are held accountable, the royal commission's role is to have governance leaders account for the failures to ensure a safe, trustworthy organisation that can care for children with responsibility and safety. That is not baying for Pell's blood; it is a sensible, commissioned request for information from a figure of governance with responsibility.

3. Justifiable Moral Panics

Thirdly, Vanstone misunderstandings the nature of the moral panic around child sexual abuse perpetrated within formerly-trusted institutions that had responsibility for the care of children. Moral panics are not, as Vanstone puts it, a form of animal instinct to hunt in a pack against vulnerable prey (such as, apparently, a Catholic Cardinal). Moral panics and public debate-both reasoned and heated-occur as a result of a complex network of social factors, including media scandal reporting, audiences positioned to express outrage, existing debates on the acceptability and unacceptability of certain moral standards, necessary suspicion about institutions that have inequitable power to protect themselves and their senior members from criminal conviction and the extent to which there can justice given to victims-past and present-of various kinds of abuses.

Moral panics do, of course, rise sometimes for wholly improper reasons (for example, manipulation into a belief among some sectors of the public that all Muslims are terrorists and therefore a threat to everyday life). However, they also emerge for arguably very good reasons as well when there is a genuine, democratically-articulated debate around future liveability (for example, moral panic around the failure of governments to appropriately address and human-induced climate change).

In the context of child abuse, the moral panic is not unjustifiable. For most of the past century priests and religious figures have been suspected and sometimes convicted of the sexual abuse of children, typically with an understanding that uses the "small number of rotten apples" approach to the problem. This was never enough to produce a moral panic.

However, the moral panic has grown exponentially over the past few years. This has not been because of a less-rational use of moral panic over paedophilia (with the accusation "pedo" used improperly in some very local contexts as a vigilante weapon to discredit an individual-a very complex social formation; also a very separate issue), but as a direct result of the recent knowledge as to how widespread both child abuse in organisations has been and how effective the cover-up by those institutions has been. Not just a "few rotten apples" but a widespread practice that is criminal.

More importantly, if the moral panic is expressed through a call to bring church leaders to account, it is at least partly the result of a new understanding of the effects of child sexual abuse emerging in the public sphere. We are no longer talking about a bit of illicit touching, improper but broadly leaving victims unaffected in the context of their larger lives. Rather, there is growing outrage and anxiety over the extent of the abuse, in addition to the severe mental health as well as financial and social effects of child abuse perpetrated by trusted figures such as priests. Suicide is the most serious outcome of abuse that has not been addressed through accountability and institutional responsiveness.

If there is a moral panic, it is not because - as Vanstone has it - Pell is a hated figure of conservatism. Rather, it is a panic about the very serious effects on the most vulnerable. It is, then, scandalous to ignore the reasons for public sentiment towards church leaders who were in governance roles and who have been protected by their lack of vulnerability, by their institutional power and by the economic wealth and access to legal knowledge of their institutions.

The public questioning of George Pell is not, then, a vigilante attempt to shame or humiliate a figure made vulnerable by his notoriety, his politics or his position. Rather, it is a deeply rational and explicitly calm form of questioning that operates within a network of 'justice-seeking' that includes the royal commission and the important role played by quality journalists and opinion-leaders.

It is a form of justice-seeking that requires responsiveness from Pell. Character defences by former government ministers in the context of such an important scandal only lead to greater suspicion and, in fact, reduce the effectiveness of debate and dialogue.