VAPOUR TRAILS – PART ONE
How often do news
articles concerning domestic violence and child abuse now appear with a link to
some kind of agency to help victims cope with mental health issues? Usually
Lifeline and Beyond Blue. And how often do we see articles concerning Rosie
Batty and the Luke Batty Foundation, both of which appear to be focussed on
women in harm’s way despite the fact that Luke was a child murdered by his
father? How often do we see politicians and the media speaking passionately
about helping the victims of inhuman crimes?
Yet there are few
articles on just how little help a victim receives. How little help they get
when they do as instructed and come forward to make a report. How too often
they are turned away and subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of those
who are supposed to help them. Indifference. Apathy. Negligence. Idleness.
Incompetence. Insensitivity. Mockery. Insults. Unfounded and defamatory
accusations. Intimidation. And where do the victims go when the authorities treat
them this way?
How is it possible
that this kind of sick and demented behaviour can continue in a society where
there are countless inquests into the few extreme incidents of systemic failure
that manage to make it into the public arena? How is it that those same
systemic failures continue and repeat, over and over despite all of the
recommendations and promises to implement positive change? How is it that
politicians, police, public servants, reporters and abusers are so
Teflon-coated they are never held to account or penalised?
Jimmy Savile, Rolf
Harris, Robert Hughs, and probably Michael Jackson too. All linked into the
media and enabled. The horrors of what they did concealed. Their victims
isolated and silenced. The Churches enjoyed the same thing until the government
turned on them with a long-overdue, well-deserved, yet hypocritical Royal
Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. But the Terms of
Reference limited it to sexual abuse, and prevented any investigation into the
failures of the police and public services.
Who sent all the
children to the Church run orphanages? Where was the oversight? Why is it that
Peter Fox was slandered, defamed and depicted as a liar for daring to expose
the corruption that led to police actually concealing and enabling the abuses
in the Church? When the police finally admitted that they’d fucked up, that
they were actually complicit, where was the apology to Fox? Where was the
penalty for their lies and corruption? Where are the prosecutions there? Where
is the effort to contact all the victims and finally let them speak? Why are
those victims still forced to remain silent?
Less than a week
before Australia Day of 2013, The
Courier-Mail published an article in their Agenda section titled Generation Grey designed to make older
men feel good about their predatory behaviour. It was written by a journalist
named Jorden Baker, a man who clearly never bothered to check his facts and
demonstrated all the integrity of a paper submarine with an on-board fire. He
certainly never responded to the email that exposed his content as utter bullshit
supporting a predator. Neither did his editor.
The piece covered
three pages. The first one was an enormous, full-page picture of the predator
with his most recent child, a daughter. The article spoke of parents having
children later in life. The predator, “59, has experienced both ends of this
spectrum. His eldest son, who he fathered at 19, is 40; his daughter Charlotte
is three.” It failed to mention he had at least two other sons born to two
different mothers, with unconfirmed rumours of at least two more because he
refused to tell his children about them.
“I was very young
the first time around, so all the stress and pressure seemed considerably
greater than they probably were,” the predator was quoted as saying. It failed to
mention he had spent those years abusing the various women he seduced and used.
It failed to mention that he was a corrupt cop eventually dismissed from
service after complaints were made about his behaviour toward young women. It
failed to mention the reality of what he was during the following four decades.
In his earlier years he was a drunkard who would return after shifts or week-long trips as a salesman to get his various female companions to do his laundry and service him as he inflicted brutal and unrelenting acts of domestic violence. It failed to mention that he was a child abusing arsehole than never remembered his children at Christmas or birthdays, never paid child support despite boasting of an income in the six-figures for most of his life, or that he continued to mock, bully, intimidate, blame, manipulate, and seek to control his victims when they tried to get answers.
In his earlier years he was a drunkard who would return after shifts or week-long trips as a salesman to get his various female companions to do his laundry and service him as he inflicted brutal and unrelenting acts of domestic violence. It failed to mention that he was a child abusing arsehole than never remembered his children at Christmas or birthdays, never paid child support despite boasting of an income in the six-figures for most of his life, or that he continued to mock, bully, intimidate, blame, manipulate, and seek to control his victims when they tried to get answers.
“You tend to miss
out on some of the good things, the fun times. Now I can put it into a
different perspective. I still do everything a young man does, except play
football.” It failed to mention that he was never really there for his kids at
all. He once took his eldest two boys to visit his parents, then his sister.
How he took them and one of his nieces to a movie with another one of his many,
many female companions. Then he went off the plan, took the boys across State
lines, dumped them with another one of his sisters before he vanished and never
reappeared for over a year. Nobody spoke about what he’d done.
It failed to mention
that he never bothered to spend time with his third son at all. Or that he
blamed all his children for the physical and psychological abuses he, their
mothers and step-fathers had heaped upon them. That he mocked them for their
suffering. That he refused to tell them who his other children were. That he
denied having a third son at all, then lied about what his name was and who the
boy’s mother was when he was caught out. That his younger brother and youngest
sister both lied to support him in his cover-up, and also helped bully his
children and victims into silence.
It failed
to mention his suspicious behaviour toward his nieces, how much time he had
spent with them when they were children, or how psychologically scarred they
were by what he’d done. They all left home at seventeen. One never returned or
spoke to her parents again. The next married a 26-year-old Baptist Minister at
17 to escape. Another became a lesbian and swore to never have children. A
fourth also swore she’d never have children, or ever marry.
It failed to mention
how many young women he had used over the years, often dating several at the
same time. That the mother of his latest child was twenty-five years his
junior. Younger than those three sons that he was known to have fathered.
Younger than the four nieces he referred to as “special” and was suspected of
having abused. That they had started dating when she was just 19 and he was 45.
How he’d been running a secretarial service at the time for the express purpose
of seducing and using young women.
It failed to mention
that his sudden change of behaviour and settling down coincided with his
parents getting very old. How his marriage helped heal the rift between him and
his parents. How the use of IVF, without any background check, allowed him to
produce a daughter he named after his father’s only sibling who had died in his
first year of life. How all this helped him change their Will and cut out the
only surviving good child, the son who had worked by his father’s side for
decades, a captain in the CFA, a good man.
It failed to mention
how he had used his younger brother and youngest sister to bully the other
siblings into submission with lawyers, an act of such vindictiveness it killed
his older brother just six months after the passing of their mother. It didn’t
use the photo of his daughter, cowering behind her mother, looking at her
father with an expression of fear and terror. Read the 58-page Timeline of
Abuse from one of his victims and you will be as shocked by what was inflicted
as you are stunned by the efforts of the police to cover it all up rather than
investigate. It didn’t mention any of this because the Courier-Mail had an
agenda, just like the predator they enabled.
Their agenda is to
profit from the news they report, from the stories they tell. It’s no different
to Facebook or any other company seeking to maximise their profits by reducing
the lives of others to commodities. It is only possible because governments refuse
to regulate these businesses, and when they are caught out the half-arsed
inquests and commissions are designed to placate an angry public but conceal
the full-extent of systemic failure and corruption. It is not enough to promise
change on condition of re-election, or promise the implementation of the same
flawed ‘corrective measures’ that have previously failed.
In the case of that
article, the predator featured runs a business providing parenting advice,
claiming to be a devoted father, husband, and Christian. It provides him access
to young women and children, and has a name that translates into what means
“escaping family commitments”, a subtle barb to mock his victims. It is no
different to any of the other scams he had run over the years to defraud
victims of their money and or subject them to sexual assaults and psychological
torment of various forms. He used those idiots at the Courier-Mail to promote
himself.
He also used it as
an opportunity to further mock and bully that eldest son he mention. A few
months earlier, that son had contacted him after fifteen years of silence. That
son had a wife and children of his own. He wanted to know who he was related to
so as to avoid any potential inbreeding issues in the future. What his father
sent in reply was as chilling as it was disturbing, a letter filled with
threats and boasts about defaming him to that son’s grandparents, on both sides
of the family, of how he had been failing to pass on property and gifts to that
son, stealing from them and his own son, and so abusive it sent that son into
another bout of depression. The article was further mockery.
The Courier-Mail
never responded to the letter of that son asking that they tell the truth. They
never did anything to correct what they had done. They had an agenda. They wanted
to sell papers. Their target demographic was older people, including predators
just like the one in the article. They sold stories. Fiction that mollified and
enabled a complicit market. The suffering of those victims, now their own victims
too, was of no concern to them, only profits.
They’ve been doing
it for years. They cover a story about child abuse or domestic violence that
actually catches their attention, not for their moral outrage, but because of
the marketability. They do the math. They calculate how much effort is required
for research, then compare the profit-cost comparison and follow the ones that
provide the most personal gain. They badger politicians who respond with all
the right sounds, an impassioned rhetoric expressing horror and a desire to
correct wrongs. But in the end…
… nothing. That son
wrote to dozens of politicians who had pleaded with victims to come forward, to
report the child abuse and domestic violence, to speak up and expose the
predators so justice could be done. That son wrote to them to reveal just what
happens to a victim that seeks help. He wrote of his experiences at the hands
of the so-called police and public servants who were supposed to help. And in
response… they ignored him and never replied, or they responded with the very
behaviour he had revealed.
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