Child abuse as serious as murder: victims
Yahoo!7/AAP
Danny Rose
10 February 2015
A victim of sexual abuse will continue to give evidence to a royal commission hearing in Melbourne.
The sexual abuse of children within the Jewish community has been likened to murder by a victim.
The man, referred to only as AVB, was on Tuesday giving evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
"We have heard evidence from multiple rabbis that the perpetration of (child sexual) abuse is akin to murder," he said.
"So if we accept that the murdering of Jews is a crime and we never, never forget it ... we need to accept and hold up that the murdering of children through sexual abuse by our own is also a crime.
"Those individuals need to be - I'm not sure if the word is banished - but they need to be held in that regard as having perpetrated murder."
AVB told the inquiry his convicted abuser - Daniel Hayman - had instead been honoured by senior Jewish figures.
Hayman was a camp chaperone at Yeshiva school, in Sydney, in the 1980s when he sexually abused AVB, who was then a young teenager.
He was convicted in mid-2014, and given a suspended prison term.
Less than a month later, Hayman's name was included on a list of sponsors at an important Jewish event.
"The honouring of Hayman was not limited to honouring him at that function, but the rabbis had rallied around him as the so-called victim in this process," AVB told the commission.
An email chain including several rabbis also labelled AVB a "moser" - an insult for informers who betray the Jewish people.
AVB also said that since reporting his abuse, his family had been shunned and bullied by many in the community, and that this was continuing.
"It only reinforces the view that there is a fundamental cultural dynamic that hasn't been addressed ... the foundation is rotten to its core," AVB said.
The royal commission is in a second week of public hearings in Melbourne.
Originally published at Yahoo!7.