Vigilantes versus pedophiles - our community shame

There are other simple measures to stamp out this scourge, which would cost far less than a Royal Commission or National Summit on Child Abuse proposed by NSW, WA and Victorian Police Commissioners.

For example, there is barely a university in Australia that has a single unit specialising in child sexual abuse for any social work, psychology or criminal justice tertiary qualification. Why is this, when they know that 80 per cent of the clients of these graduates will have been sexually abused as children? People in prisons, alcoholics, family violence perpetrators, drug addicts, prostitutes, people with mental illnesses, the list goes on.

The police need to be educated about the issue since the majority of criminals have also been sexually abused. Treatment programs for victims also need to be stepped up.

But for me, of paramount importance because it can save lives, is that unless we go back to the death penalty, we have to find some solution to deal with and treat abusers. You may drive them out of your suburb, but they simply move on to abuse elsewhere.

Pedophiles like Dennis Ferguson, account for only 5 per cent of abuse. Research shows that 95 per cent of child sexual abuse happens within families. There are treatment programs which deal effectively with this phenomenon (such as SafeCare in WA) which should be adopted around Australia.

We, as a community, need to get our heads out of the sand. Politicians need to educate themselves about the financial and personal costs of this plague and do everything they can to stamp it out.

As Bill Glaser, a Melbourne criminal psychologist who specialises in treating offenders said in an address to the National Crime Authority, “(C)hild sexual abuse … has accounted for probably more misery and suffering than any of the great plagues of history, including the bubonic plague, tuberculosis and syphilis”.

He went on to say, that if a plague, which struck down a quarter of our daughters and one in seven of our sons, was visible, we would be stopping at nothing and would be sparing no expense to deal with it.

Because we refuse to believe the extent of this invisible scourge, politicians deal out paltry sums, have half-baked and under funded programs and refuse to acknowledge the need to deal with the problem in a holistic way.

While governments continue to fail in this responsibility, vigilante behaviour will escalate … to our growing community shame.