Tuesday, 2 August 2022

Statements on reports, papers and petitions

Child sexual abuse

Community petition

Mr GRIMLEY (Western Victoria) (19:11): Recently I tabled a change.org petition as a paper, with over 12 500 signatures. The e-petition is titled No Wrong Door and addresses the suboptimal approach we still have in Victoria in dealing with survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I thank members for providing me leave to table such an important document and, more specifically, for continuing to allow survivors and their loved ones a voice.

A ‘no wrong door’ approach is one where victim-survivors of childhood sexual assault are not turned away when they disclose their ordeals and are given more effective pathways for recovery. It is recommendation 9.1 of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for an accessible, integrated model. The Victorian government’s submission to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System recommended:

… service reform initiatives indicate it is important that:

• intake into services is person-centred, with multiple entry points and a ‘no wrong door approach’.

Unfortunately this has been neither accepted nor implemented by Victoria—we do not know why—despite its success in New South Wales. Integrated health and care systems such as New South Wales’s integrated prevention and response to violence, abuse and neglect framework increase accessibility to specialist services for survivors and their families. This is done by creating safe, trauma-informed places for disclosure of abuse and means staff are trained to go beyond, ‘What’s wrong with you?’, to ask, ‘What happened to you?’. Staff can then provide or link people to specialist services as a ‘no wrong door’ for disclosure of sexual abuse. Increasing accessibility to trauma-informed services and supports for survivors will save lives and reduce pain and suffering for many Victorians, their families and the community. Integrated service systems also create significant economic benefits, should we even need to touch on the financial side of things.

In short, this petition asks the Victorian government to pilot the implementation of integrated service systems in two communities devastated by institutional child sexual abuse, those being the Ballarat and Bayside communities. The New South Wales model has been implemented with great results. In fact an interim review of the scheme showed that two-thirds of respondents participating in the new approach agreed or strongly agreed that their system integration had led to improvements in health and wellbeing outcomes. A full evaluation by NSW Health will be published in just a few weeks. Basically the New South Wales framework sits alongside others in the USA that are specifically integrated systems for forms of sexual abuse, domestic violence and other trauma.

The UK is leading the world in implementation of integrated systems of health and care at scale for all citizens, and now is the time for Victoria to do the right thing by victim-survivors of childhood abuse and implement this pilot. Karen, the principal petitioner, makes a great point that the very sensible push for national healthcare system reform could be partly addressed by primary prevention strategies earlier on. Learning from the UK is a no-brainer as they have proven it reduces the burden on the National Health Service, reduces cost and increases health and care outcomes. We need to learn from the New South Wales framework, which can be integrated into a citizen model of integrated care. We need to learn from Victoria’s own Better at Home initiative from the recent budget, which integrates allied health care and subacute services into a single service model.

We decided to table the signatures and names only, instead of the comments page, as there were quite a few recounts of traumatic abuse. I would like to reflect that this petition allowed many survivors to share their story. In some comments, people shared sympathies for lost loved ones, including ‘In memory of my cousin, Trevor’ and ‘I love you Dad’. Others reflected on their own experience:

I need to find out why we had our innocence taken from us by convicted paedophiles being placed at Beaumaris primary

And also:

I also was a victim of institutional abuse

One of the comments really highlights my thinking when I first spoke to Karen. The comment is:

Why on earth is this not being dealt with? After a national Royal Commission!

This is a great question. I would like to thank Karen Walker for her incredibly tireless advocacy on behalf of not only her late brother Ian but her partner and all other survivors. Ian’s story is one that I will not share here today due to timing, but I am sure members in this place can only assume the troubles he had after his abuse. This is where Karen’s motivation and passion comes from. I would also like to thank the other survivors that my office and I spoke to in preparation for this petition to discuss this issue in more depth. You are the definition of ‘brave’. Lastly, thanks to the 12 000 signatories who gave their name to a great cause. Know that I and Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party are fully committed to supporting you throughout your journey. I commend this paper to the house.