Monsters and Horror in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

Penny Crofts, Faculty of Law, UTS

ABSTRACT: This article analyses how the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse negotiates the figure of the paedophile as monster through the horror genre.
This article analyses the resonance of the category of paedophiles as monsters or monstrous and the ways in which this impacted upon witnesses’ responses to sex offenders, based on assumptions that monsters are outsiders or strangers that are instantly recognisable. I go on to explore the claim that one of the main effects of regarding sex offenders as monsters is that these offenders are construed as having extraordinary powers so that ordinary measures to stop them would be ineffective—accordingly, this reading underplays the significance of institutional responsibility. I conclude that although the Royal Commission consistently undermines and rejects the idea of sex offenders as monsters, a horror reading is still appropriate and insightful. The true “horror” of the Royal Commission is aroused not by the figurative monsters but by the institutions themselves, and their failures.

KEYWORDS: Sexual abuse, Systemic failure, Royal Commission, Monster, Horror 

INTRODUCTION

The idea of the paedophile as monster is so common that it is the subject not only of academic analysis, but also of self-reflexive media reports criticising media representations of paedophiles as monsters. This article analyses how the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse negotiates the figure of the paedophile as monster. I consider the ways in which the notion of paedophiles as monsters or monstrous inform a number of the witness statements and the ways the Royal Commission navigates those constructions. I will examine how the notion of the monstrous paedophile has intersected with the criminal law in terms of the implications for intervention, enforcement and responsibility.  I use monster theory and the genre with which monsters are most closely related, horror, to understand the paedophile. Analysis of the figure through the horror genre, in particular, makes available an interrogation of the construction of paedophiles as monsters and proffers insights into the negotiation of this figure by the Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse commenced in 2013 and has recently been extended to continue until the end of 2017. At the time of writing, the Royal Commission has undertaken 56 public hearings, and held more than 6,400 private sessions with victim/survivors of child sexual abuse, with more than 2,000 people awaiting private sessions. The formal public hearings examine evidence about child sexual abuse and how institutions have (not) responded to allegations of abuse. The public hearings can be accessed by the public and are also telecasted live on the web, the transcripts are available on the website and the findings are then summarised in Reports. The Royal Commission has considered child sexual abuse in a wide range of institutions including schools, after-school care, religious organisations, the Australian Defence Force, the entertainment industry, sporting clubs, and health care providers. The Royal Commission has generated a huge archive with hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts, reports, publications and findings all of which are available on the Royal Commission website. Whilst the data is readily available on the website it is not easily searched. Terms cannot be entered to search the whole website – rather, each individual Report and transcripts from particular days need to be searched individually. In order to limit the data this article focuses primarily on the Final Reports of public hearings of selected case studies – which include quotations from witnesses and findings by the Royal Commission. I have supplemented these sources with quotations from transcripts of the public hearings and also media responses to the public hearings. I have read all the Final Reports and selected particular stories as representative of general themes highlighted throughout the Royal Commission Reports. Although the Royal Commission has considered historical examples of institutional failures to respond to abuse, this article focuses particularly on Royal Commission Reports of institutional failures in the twenty-first century. I have chosen these reports to disrupt the comforting notion that institutional failures in response to child sexual abuse arose in the distant past and have since been resolved.  

There are various ways in which child sex offenders can be conceived and constructed (for example as ordinary offenders or mentally ill), but currently they are frequently labelled and regarded as monsters. For example, in his analysis of sex offending, Thomas argued that in an explosion of media interest paedophiles became thoroughly demonised as ‘monsters’ – ‘evil’, ‘beasts’, and ‘fiends’. Silverman and Wilson have argued that with the new millennium, paedophiles and terrorists are the ‘bogey men’ of contemporary times. Monsters are the stuff of fiction, and are particularly associated with the horror genre. Accordingly, I explore the ways in which the horror genre can provide insight into the ways in which the Royal Commission navigates the figure of the paedophile as a monster, and the implications of their dealings. This idea of studying the Royal Commission through the prism of horror is part of a larger cultural legal studies project of examining popular culture for how it reflects and expresses assumptions, values and wishes for and about the legal system. Given the centrality of monsters to the horror genre, I rely upon horror stories to enrich and problematize the labelling of sex offenders as monsters. This is consistent with a classic law and literature approach whereby stories are relied upon to supplement and provide insight into the law. The Royal Commission itself ostensibly reflects and reinforces a faith in storytelling with an open invitation to survivors and their families to tell their stories of abuse and its impacts – in private and public hearings. Within the discipline of law and literature, however, there has been a critique of the ‘romantic’ myth that literature is thought to complete law and an excessive faith in narrative. The Royal Commission’s handling of the stories of victims reflects an understanding that stories, in and of themselves, are not enough. Whilst there may be underlying assumptions of the cathartic nature of storytelling, the Royal Commission has gone beyond this to categorise and organise the stories into structural themes and issues regarding institutional failure with the aim of identifying areas for reform. 

Further, my method is also informed by the recent turn in law and literature to genre as a form of critique of the law. The concept of genre is itself complex and open to debate. Genre has been variously described as a ‘signal system’, family resemblance, or pragmatically as the process of where we shelve a book or how we market a film. A key point is that genre raises and imposes assumptions and expectations of what and how a text communicates, and our interpretation in turn is a product of our assumptions about the generic tradition on which the text relies. Rosmarin describes genre as ‘a kind of schema, a way of discussing a literary text in ways that link it with other texts, and finally, phrase it in terms of those texts…’ This approach highlights the power of the reader (or critic) to categorise and interpret a text as part of a genre. It has been criticised by some theorists as according too much power to the reader, but it has the advantage of revealing the construction of ‘specific worlds’ with their own ‘definition of space, time, moral ethos and players’ and how worlds, including legal worlds, are created and maintained. Here genre is understood not merely as a stylistic ‘device’ but as constituting ways of being. 

Genre can provide a means for awareness and critique of how the Reports of the Royal Commission can be read, and a different mode of interpretation. This kind of critique helps people ‘begin to have trouble thinking things the way they have been thought’ and experience dissonance. This literary approach can make us aware of how we are disciplined to separate sense and sensibility. Royal Commissions are a curious genre in and of themselves. Royal commissions are frequently used in Australia, Canada and Great Britain to investigate political wrongdoing and to make recommendations regarding policy and law reform. Although extraordinary modes of inquiry, Royal Commissions are a regular feature of government administration in Australia and Canada. Royal Commissions have all the trappings of law and yet are quasi-judicial. They are informed by law, can include recommendations for prosecutions and law reform, and tend to be populated by judicial officers. The lexicon of a Royal Commission is legal – particularly in terms of hearings and findings – and the hearings reflect the physical architecture of a courtroom and are often held in existing courtrooms. However, the Royal Commission is entitled to ask questions that go beyond those permitted by, or even conceived of as relevant to, the law. 

The current Royal Commission has aroused horror through its unveiling of past and present wrongdoing. The question is whether anything is achieved by this recounting of horrors. The Royal Commission has provided a report on the sheer number of inquiries on institutional abuse that have been conducted historically and in recent times, which have ostensibly accomplished little or nothing. The non-implementation of recommendations is the most consistent criticism of Royal Commissions. I draw upon the horror genre to accomplish a critical reading of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to uncover that which we take to be self-evident – how and why we read, listen to and/or watch the Royal Commission. Constructing the Royal Commission as horror reverses or undoes the Royal Commission genre, making us aware of how specific expectations, interpretations and literacies underlie and undergird our readings.  Royal Commissions tend to be evaluated in terms of function – does a particular Royal Commission serve political ends to avert a crisis or does it present a meaningful opportunity to change policy and practice? This article puts the affect of horror at the centre of an analysis of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. I consider whether or not the horror genre may offer hope for reform, whereby the arousal of the affect of horror justifies and requires change. The Royal Commission need not, of course, be read as horror. For example, an alternative approach is suggested by Slaughter, who reads human rights through the genre of melodrama, arguing that it constructs audiences who understand themselves as bystanders who are ‘capable of feeling compassion without fear’. 

The boundaries of the horror genre are open to dispute. The horror genre takes many different forms, and fans may favour one particular style over another (such as slasher versus zombie), there are however two key attributes associated with the genre. First, the genre is named for the emotional or physiological response it is intended to arouse – horror. The Oxford English Dictionary defines horror as ‘a painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance; the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful… a thrill of awe, or of imaginative fear.’ Whilst there are other breakdowns of the affect/s the horror genre is expected to generate, and different horror stories privilege different affects, for the purposes of this analysis Carroll’s assertion that horror is a mixture of fear and disgust is pertinent. The aim of horror is the arousal of bodily sensation – to label a horror ‘good’ means that it is scary and creepy. Second, the horror genre is particularly associated with monsters. I will consider the attributes of monsters in more detail throughout this paper, but note now that central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror genre is the transgression of the borders of humanity – a disturbance of the ‘natural order’. The fear and fascination of monsters, so central to the arousal of horror, is due to their potential to contaminate and undermine systems of order. Not all horror movies have monsters – sometimes it is humans doing particularly evil or monstrous things – and it is open to dispute as to whether as a consequence of these evil actions the villain is a monster. Moreover, many horror stories do not necessarily arouse horror. There are many ‘horror’ series on television currently that are populated by monsters which are not really scary, especially for aficionados of horror. Despite this, devotees (as well as those utterly horrified by the horror genre) are confident in their own definitions and expectations of the genre. 

Below, I consider, first, the resonance generally of the category of monster and the affect of horror associated with sex offenders. Second, I consider the ways that attributes of monsters impacted upon witnesses’ responses to sex offenders in the Royal Commission, based on assumptions that monsters are outsiders or strangers that are instantly recognisable. I go on to explore the claim that one of the main effects of regarding sex offenders as monsters is that these offenders are construed as having extraordinary powers so that ordinary measures to stop them would be ineffective—accordingly, this reading underplays the significance of institutional responsibility. I conclude that although the Royal Commission consistently undermines and rejects the idea of sex offenders as monsters, a horror reading is still appropriate and insightful. The true “horror” of the Royal Commission is aroused not by the figurative monsters but by the institutions themselves, and their failures.

THE HORROR OF MONSTROUS PAEDOPHILES

The premise of this article is to explore the implications of the construction of sex offenders as monsters by witnesses in the Royal Commission. As far as I can ascertain from the searches through some of the hundreds of thousands of pages of transcripts and reports generated by the Royal Commission, witnesses do not explicitly label sex offenders ‘monsters’. They do, however, invoke the language of monstrosity: they speak of sex offenders as ‘evil’ and/or ‘predators’. For example, a mother told the Royal Commission that she had told a bishop that her sons thought Ryan was ‘evil’, and she had threatened to shoot Ryan or ‘any other evil priest if they came near my sons or my home’. Offenders were described as ‘predators’ a ‘dangerous sexual predator’, or as a ‘horrendous evil’ or having an ‘evil character’ and ‘predatory inclinations’. Another witness stated she thought  ‘evil rides around the church’ or decried the ‘abhorrent and evil behaviour’ of the offender. These descriptions of sex offenders as evil predators is consistent with monsters – human/beasts transgressing the lines between good and evil, human and animal. In horror, monsters are portrayed as evil malevolent beings who wish only to do us harm (think pretty much any monster). Despite the absence of explicit labelling of paedophiles as monsters by witnesses in the Royal Commission, the media reporting of the Royal Commission has sustained a portrayal of paedophiles as monsters, with headlines such as ‘Friendly priest became paedophile “monster”’, ‘Evil, depraved monster paedophile’, and ‘Gerald Ridsdale: portrait of a monster as a forgetful old man’. 

The construction of paedophiles as monsters or monstrous has been linked to an accompanying shift in how sex offending was portrayed in popular discourse from the 1990s onwards, when popular discourse shifted from child sexual abuse to increasingly focus on the figure of the paedophile, who was constructed as a highly dangerous stranger who attacks, sexually abuses and possibly kills children. The media frequently portrays sex offenders in a way that is sensationalistic and demonises offenders. The language used is frequently consistent with the construction of sex offenders as monsters. Epithets used to describe paedophiles in the media include evil, fiend, predator, demons, perverts and monsters. Like monsters, paedophiles are constructed as a threat. They are deviant, abnormal, predatory and perverted. The media focuses on a small number of convicted offenders. They are presented as a distinct and dangerous category, as a separate species, sub-human or a ‘breed apart’. Like monsters, paedophiles are conceptualised as outside society with people refusing to accept sex offenders who have served jail time back into their community. 

Labelling paedophiles as monsters resonates in part due to the transgression of boundaries. Monsters are represented in horror and conceptualised in philosophy as beyond understanding, as incomprehensible to human beings. For example, Foucault explicitly considered the production of monsters in Abnormal: 
Essentially, the monster is the casuistry that is necessarily introduced into law by the confusion of nature… it is a monster only because it is also a legal labyrinth, a violation of and an obstacle to the law, both transgression and undecidability at the level of the law.
For Foucault, the production of monsters should be understood as a double breach of nature and law, they ‘combine the impossible and the forbidden’. Monsters generate fear and fascination because they not only break rules and cross borders, but because they also challenge the border itself, by being both and neither one thing and another. Monsters resist and refuse easy categorization. They are disturbing hybrids that refuse to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’, problematizing and challenging classifications built on hierarchy or binary oppositions. They embody and unleash the chaos that exists on the other side of cultural boundaries. Monsters break apart the ‘either/or’ syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to ‘and/or’. For example, vampires are the living dead – they are neither/both dead and alive.

The specific border changes from story to story, but the function of the monster remains the same – ‘to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.’ In some stories, the monstrous is produced at the border between life and death (vampire and zombie stories), the normal and the supernatural (The Exorcist [1973], The Omen [1976], The Nightmare on Elm Street series, Stranger Things [2016]), between human and beast (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Paedophiles are regarded as having transgressed a boundary erected by law and society between adults and children. Adults having sex with children is against the law and arguably against nature (in accordance with Foucault’s definition of the monster). By breaching this rule, sex offenders have crossed the border of humanity – having this ‘evil’ and ‘perverted’ desire and acting upon it is regarded as unimaginable and outside the realms of humanity. Moreover, the transgressions of child sex offenders undermine the accepted roles and boundaries between adults and children. Not only do paedophiles actively harm children, they also interrogate the role of those adults who failed to protect children from sex offenders. 

According to Foucault, each age had its ‘privileged monster’ – the bestial human in the Middle Ages, Siamese or conjoined twins in the Renaissance and the hermaphrodite in the Classical Age. Monsters are historically conditioned rather than psychological universals, and much of contemporary horror revolves around a concern for and breach of sexual boundaries. 
The release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous and excessive, both the perversion and the excess being the logical outcome of repressing.
Arguably, paedophiles are ‘privileged monsters’ due to the breaching of sexual boundaries.  However, although children feature in horror, they are rarely explicitly portrayed as victims of sexual abuse. Child sex offenders are almost never portrayed in horror stories, possibly due to the taboo of such a lowbrow genre representing such a serious and taboo subject, and/or perhaps due to a contemporary perception of sex offenders as real-life monsters who disrupt the comforting contract with audiences of horror fiction that the monsters, whilst scary, are not real.

Only some individuals or groups are at any historical moment demonised by the term monster. Heroes, like Superman, Spiderman and Doctor Who are also unnatural and inexplicable, yet they are not labelled monsters. Accordingly, there is more to a monster than the transgression of laws and classificatory systems. In defining the horror genre, one of the most important characteristics are the modes of affect that horror films intend to arouse in audiences, the arousal of fear and disgust. Sex offenders return us to archetypal fears of childhood of the bogeyman and of adults who are not what they seem. The word ‘monstrous’ is used to imply very large size – and the image of the sex offender plays on fears of a large threat looming over a child. Sex offenders encapsulate the adult anxiety of a child going missing, that heart stopping moment of taking one’s gaze away for a moment and losing a child. Sex offenders also arouse disgust. Disgust is not just a reactionary conservatism, but the emotional expression of a moral intolerance of practices antithetical to the individual and the community. In his masterful analysis, Miller argues that disgust is a moral and social sentiment that conveys a ‘strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its powers to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact, or ingestion.’ Miller describes disgust as an emotion that initially expresses the protection of the body but develops into the protection of the soul. For example, humans first express disgust in response to hair in the mouth, but the lexicon of disgust develops to express moral opprobrium. The language of disgust can be used to express the horror of eating food that we discover too late contains a cockroach and then transferred to express repugnance of sex offenders and sex offending. Carroll has argued that monsters are something that humans do not want to have contact with – we recoil from them and feel nauseated by them, even when the threat of harm has been removed. They ‘make one’s skin creep’. 

Monsters arouse the affect of horror because of their capacity and willingness to inflict harm. Through their actions they maim, destroy, contaminate and spoil that which is good. For example, vampires suck the life out of their victims. Once infected, victims of vampires and zombies lose all interest in that for which they previously cared. They are taken away from themselves. 
Disgust never allows us to escape clean. It underpins the sense of despair that impurity and evil are contagious and endure, and take everything down with them.
Sex offenders can inflict serious physical, mental and social harms to victims. Every report of the Royal Commission devotes some time to enunciating the harm done to the victims (and their families) by the sex offender. These harms include physical and psychological problems, including depression and anxiety. It can affect relationships with family members, friends and partners. The trauma can impact on employment history and prospects. For example, in the case study on the response of the Australian Christian Churches to allegations of sexual abuse, the Report notes that the District Court judge sentencing the sex offender noted that his impact on the victim was ‘catastrophic’. The victim spoke of the effect of the offender on his life in terms consistent with the lexicon of horror: 
The pain, thoughts and considerable suffering haunts me every day. People say it gets easier with time: no. That’s a lie, it never goes away and doesn’t get easier with time.
Extreme disgust can fill us with a sense of being haunted. It is contaminating and infectious—that which is disgusting has almost magical powers of invasiveness and duration. The language used by witnesses in the Royal Commission is consistent with the lexicon of disgust, for example sex abusers are ‘too revolting’ for committing ‘such hideous crimes’. In apologising for his and the School’s failure to respond, one former principal stated:
This Royal Commission has revealed the horrific extent of Trutmann's sordid and predatory sexual abuse of at least 40 young students in the Geelong Grammar School Highton Boarding House and elsewhere between 1985 and 1996. It has been a disturbing and sickening revelation to me.
The word ‘horrific’ is an offshoot of horror. The physical, visceral response of ‘sickening’ is consistent with disgust. A victim of abuse asserted that, as a result of the abuse, ‘the past ten years of my life have been a living hell.’ In the Royal Commission Reports, the harm inflicted intentionally by sex offenders is described in terms reminiscent of horror. While not being explicitly labelled monsters in the Royal Commission, the great emphasis upon the harms inflicted are consistent with the idea of sex offenders as monsters, as evil predators who arouse horror due to the intentional infliction of lasting harm. However, as I argue in the final section of this article, the wider scope of the Royal Commission’s investigations, and, its particular concern with the role of institutions in facilitating abuse, significantly contributes to the characterization of institutions themselves as monstrous.

STRANGERS AND OUTSIDERS
In contrast to the approach of the Royal Commission itself, the conceptualisation of sex offenders as monsters by witnesses in the Royal Commission is more explicit (and dangerous). A key attribute of monsters is that they are outsiders. This is in part because their infliction of harm upon others locates them beyond the borders of humanity, but also because of an assumption that monsters are strangers – they come from somewhere else, they are not like you and me. In many horror stories, a monstrous stranger or outsider threatens the family. Strangers have tormented the family in fictions such as Poltergeist, American Horror Series 1, It, The Shining, The Exorcist and the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. The genre represents a threat from outside disrupting the safety of the family (and frequently the family home). 
This construction of the paedophile as monster is misleading because it directs the focus to stranger danger. The media tends to focus on a few high profile cases of abuse – and these are almost always cases involving strangers. This augments a belief that the primary threat comes from outside the family or familiar structures, and that the threat emanates from a stranger. In the Royal Commission, this idea of stranger danger presents and is disrupted in different ways. In Case Study Number 18, for example, the offender, Baldwin, married into the family of Doctor Lehmann, the senior pastor of the Sunshine Church. As a consequence of this familial relationship, Doctor Lehmann failed to adequately respond to complaints about Youth Pastor Baldwin’s inappropriate behaviour with the victim, ALA. In addition to complaints and reports by other staff, including senior leaders of the Church, Doctor Lehmann was personally aware of some of Baldwin’s inappropriate behaviour including that Baldwin had an ‘intense’ relationship with ALA, Baldwin frequently segregated ALA from others, wanted to give a large number of awards to ALA, had proposed purchasing ALA an expensive present, and had been alone with ALA in his car. Doctor Lehmann asserted that despite these warnings, he failed to protect ALA from Baldwin because Baldwin was his son-in-law. 
When I sit down and have a meal with him, share a bottle of red wine with him, I don’t think I’m doing this with a paedophile.
Despite Baldwin being convicted of ten charges, at the time of the Royal Commission Doctor Lehmann still did not accept that Baldwin was a paedophile, stating: 
I’m not saying he didn’t make errors of judgment, but I have two grandsons by him, a third one about to be born; if I believe he is a paedophile, then I’ve got to face the reality that our three grandsons are at great risk.
For Doctor Lehmann, any threat to his family is still conceived of as coming from outside the family, by a stranger, rather than from a member of his family, and the father of his grand-children. 
This failure to recognize sex offenders on the assumption that they will be a stranger or outsider is a recurring theme in the Royal Commission. It was expressed thus by a victim: 
The school instructed students on ‘stranger danger’, but there was no emphasis on ‘friendly danger’ or grooming behaviors. WP, a survivor of child sexual abuse at the school, said in evidence that if there had been, it would have been easier for him to report his sexual abuse.

The Royal Commission highlights that the emphasis on stranger danger results in a misrecognition of threats. The stranger is someone who is unknown – and who comes from the outside. But in all the Royal Commission case studies, the offender is someone who is in a position of trust and is known to the victim and the family. It is inherent in the terms of reference of the Royal Commission that the focus is on offenders operating within institutions rather than as outsiders. In fact, the offender may have been assiduous in cultivating the trust of the victim, their family and the institution.

A key plot device in the genre of horror is the origin of the monster. This reflects a question of philosophy and theology – from whence does evil come? One way of resolving a monster’s origins is by constructing an alternative world or dimension. In Alien, the monster is from another planet. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the presence of ghouls is explained by the town resting on a hell mouth. In The Exorcist, the possessing demon is from hell. In Stranger Things [2016] the monster comes from another dimension – the ‘upside down’. Even where monsters have been created in this world, they are outsiders and strangers due to their transgression of borders. Frankenstein’s monster is created by comingling corpses and crossing the border between life and death. 
Although the genre of horror celebrates and performs stranger danger, it also portrays a more insidious monster – that which comes from within the family and/or the community. In films such as Scream, Halloween, Friday the 13^th the monster starts as a human in the family and/or community. In novels and films such as The Shining and Insidious, a beloved family member is (possessed by) the monster. Accordingly, the Royal Commission is consistent with much of the horror genre which plays with or disrupts the expectation that monsters are outsiders or strangers – victims are too focused on outside threats or too close to someone to perceive the inside threat. Horror and the Royal Commission remind us that this complacent focus on outsiders is misplaced and dangerous.

THE RECOGNISABILITY OF MONSTERS

The assumption that monsters are outsiders informs a related belief – that monsters are recognisable. They are not like you and me, and their monstrosity is visible. In the Royal Commission, some witnesses did not report inappropriate behaviour because they assumed that paedophiles are easily recognisable. For example, in Case Study 2, Lord abused children at and throughout his employment as a casual childcare assistant at YMCA between 2009 and 2011. He was convicted of 13 offences involving 12 children in 2013. One of his colleagues gave evidence that her understanding of the demographics of a typical offender was likely to be from media and television: 

‘It would be somebody older, unmarried, and took that sort of sexual orientation through the means of desperation rather than choice’. Similarly, [another colleague] stated that she did not put Lord ‘in the category of child molesters’ as she had a mental ‘picture of a child molester’, which was nothing like Lord.

The image that staff had of paedophiles meant that they did not recognise Lord as a paedophile, because he looked no different from you and me. Indeed, this was one of the reasons they gave for not reporting him, even though some of his behaviour was ‘odd’. 

The assumption that sex offenders are recognisable monsters is reflected and reinforced in media reporting of certain paedophiles who have captured the popular imagination, to the extent that these offenders have been labelled ‘iconic monsters’. The photos of paedophiles under arrest, trying to evade an angry public or their mugshots confirm a stereotypical image of a paedophile – with wild grey hair, frenzied eyes, inappropriate clothing choices. We assume that we know one when we see one. For example, most people in New South Wales, Australia would be able to recognise serial sex offender Dennis Ferguson. Upon revelations of his sex offending history, the entertainer Jimmy Savile’s appearance fit so well into the stereotype of a sex offender that it was almost as though he was hiding in plain sight: Savile usually wore a tracksuit, gold jewellery and had long white hair. 

This assumption of recognisability is informed by the belief that the body of the monster itself displays the transgression of boundaries. Many iconic monsters are instantly recognisable as monsters – think zombies, Frankenstein’s monster, the Blob, some vampires, and Mr Hyde. Monsters may be instantly recognisable by some external insignia – think the facial scars and the knives for fingers of Freddie Krueger. Or they become recognisable by their behaviour – zombies walk funny and cannot talk. It is comforting to believe that monsters are recognisable at first sight, even though the sight of them may in and of itself be horrific. This is based on the idea that wicked deeds or character are manifested in external traits. 

The horror genre also complicates and disrupts assumptions about the recognisability of monsters. Many monsters lack external markings and any indications that they are monstrous – including those in The Omen, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and most vampires. These stories play on an insidious fear that anyone could be a monster and we would have no idea until the point of no return. Their chameleonic nature is part of their horror. These films express and excite a paralysing paranoia, the monster/alien could be everyone and no-one. Thus, in the glorious It Follows, the monster is a shape-shifter that is knowable because only the victim can see it. The Scream films and, the recent highly enjoyable Netflix television adaptation, have a monster that is recognisable due to his/her mask – but when unmasked – is a part of the community. In all these movies, the monster is only recognised at the point of no return. This reflects a paradox in popular discourse about paedophiles – on the one hand paedophiles are easy to spot but on the other hand they are able to merge and manipulate. Paedophiles are constructed like gothic monsters with a dual identity – with a façade of normality covering evil and cunning – like Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dorian Grey and his portrait. In many horror stories, the monster is easily recognisable to the audience as a monster, but not to victims until too late. This is particularly the case for vampires who are strangers who gain acceptance into a community but have insignia such as white skin, pointy teeth and often a foreign accent that indicate they are dangerous. The idea of appearances belying reality is disturbing and discombobulating:

Abjection… is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you…

The pretence of civilized behaviour and friendliness in order to access children disturbs and undermines system and order. 

I certainly have been absolutely horrified by the predatory actions, the depravity, and the power play by these paedophile priests over people who should have expected just the opposite: care and love and support. 

Horror is aroused because of the disjunction between the duties and expectations of a person and their nefarious motives. The person who seems most helpful, most interested and most caring is the person who intends the most harm. Their charms are used for nefarious purposes – like the sex offender Lord offering free babysitting, or the ‘friendly priest’. The horror genre problematizes the assumed recognisability of monsters – the worst monsters are hidden or not recognised until too late. Monsters are the perfect figures for negative identity, they produce the negative of human – so it is difficult to articulate exactly what a paedophile looks like. The horror genre encourages us to reflect that there are no specific traits associated with paedophiles and undermines the assumption that they are recognisably wrong or ‘off’.

THE MAGICAL POWERS OF MONSTERS

The Royal Commission demonstrates that the conceptualisation of sex offenders as monsters who are recognisable by some witnesses resulted in these witnesses failing to report and respond to the abuse at any level. Of more significance is the belief that sex offenders have extraordinary powers so that ordinary measures to defeat them are doomed. This reflects a key attribute of monsters in the horror genre – that of extraordinary powers.

The idea of special powers ascribed to paedophiles was asserted by some witnesses in the Royal Commission. This was primarily ascribed to paedophiles’ monomania – the desire for access to and sex with children.  Managers of institutions asserted the special powers of paedophiles to explicate their failure to protect children. In other words, they did not stop the sex offender(s) because they could not. For example, the YMCA, one of the largest providers of after school care in New South Wales issued a media release during the public hearing in 2013 referring to: 

Lord’s ‘secretive and sophisticated activities that allowed him to gain access to children’, ‘the insidious, secretive, devious and sophisticated conduct of paedophiles who seek access to children through child care organisations’.
The YMCA depicted Lord as a ‘mysterious paedophile who had infiltrated their organisation’. He was especially cunning, mysterious and malevolent, thus there was no reasonable way that YMCA could have prevented him from offending. This parallels media representations of paedophiles as sly, manipulative and deceitful, systematically infiltrating certain professions in order to access children.

The belief that paedophiles have extraordinary powers is consistent with the construction of monsters. Some monsters might have powers that no human has – like immortality, extra-sensory hearing or smell. Harms inflicted by Freddie Krueger in his victim’s dreams are carried through into real life. Some monsters might have desires that no human has – including eating brains or drinking blood – or just a malevolent desire to maim and destroy. In the current Scream series on Netflix, the killer hides behind a mask, but seems to have superhuman strength, speed and cunning. Part of a monster’s strength is frequently monomania – they want only one thing. Thus zombies are usually not particularly speedy or smart – but they only want to eat brains – they do not get distracted or tired and are inexorable. A central tenet of the horror genre is that ordinary measures against monsters will not succeed. Monsters stalk, threaten and wreak havoc until the bitter end of horror stories and often beyond (allowing for sequels). After all, if monsters were defeated at the beginning there would be no horror story. They are only defeated (if at all), at the end with extreme measures – which then in and of itself has the potential to undermine the humanity of the hero/ine. Vampires and zombies cannot just be killed. The rules vary slightly across stories, but something extraordinary is required to resolve monsters - vampires need a stake through the heart and the brains of zombies must be destroyed.

An ordinary response to threats or harm would be to turn to people in authority, but in the genre of horror authorities are often portrayed as ineffective or themselves evil/corrupted. In the Royal Commission, people feared reporting suspected sex offenders because they thought that they would not be believed. For example, teachers at an independent school stated that they felt ‘trepidation’ in raising concerns about suspicious behaviour in part because they feared that they would be subjected to rejection, ostracism or bullying if they reported the suspicious behaviour. This is consistent with plots in horror stories where whistle-blowers are themselves treated as the problem. Unfortunately, the Royal Commission reports all too frequently confirm these apprehensions of disbelief and the failure to respond by those in authority. One teacher at a Perth school overcame her fears that she would look ‘stupid’ if she reported inappropriate behaviour, however after nothing came of her first report she did not report any further inappropriate behaviour. The Royal Commission has also analysed police responses to reports of sex offending which at times (but not always) confirmed the critical portrayal of the authorities in horror fiction. For example, Report Number Nine provides a history of failures by the police to investigate, prosecutors to prosecute, and the authorities failure to not only act to prevent sexual abuse, but glorifying and celebrating the offender by inducting him into the swimming Hall of Fame despite multiple allegations of abuse. In the genre of horror, police, teachers and parents usually have no idea of what is going on, if they are told they do not believe it, and their actions are frequently worse than useless. Police and security guards are particularly inept. They often suspect and lock up victims and/or treat the person who reports the monster as mad. Police and security guards either end up dead or are revealed as monsters themselves. Horror fiction often portrays the fear that there is no-one to whom a monster and its wrongdoing can be reported, and even if there was, that that person would not do anything useful. Both the Royal Commission and the genre of horror explore the intensified fear of feeling that there is no one to turn to and that authorities cannot or will not help. 

In the Royal Commission, some members of management used the argument of the extraordinary powers of monsters and the consequent impossibility of defeating and protecting against paedophiles to explain and defend institutional failures. According to this argument, there were no basic steps that could have been taken against sex offenders. How, the management of YMCA argued, could they have protected the institution against the cunning lies of Lord?:

 Jonathan Lord offered two referees and obtained a Working with Children Check. He presented himself as a respectable member of his community. He made a general reference to having been involved with a children's camp in the United States and, as is now apparent, he lied about the circumstances in which he returned to Australia …

Although the Royal Commission presented the assertions of the extraordinary powers of sex offenders in the final reports, the Commission undermined and disputed these excuses. The Royal Commission has consistently sought to reject the notion of paedophiles as monsters and to emphasise that ordinary measures and procedures could and would have prevented sex offending. Thus, a common institutional failure in the Royal Commission Reports was not following internal procedures for recruitment, any of which would have resulted in the offender not having been employed in the first place. For example, if the person in charge of recruitment, Barnat, had followed even one of the YMCA recruitment policies Lord would not have been employed. Lord submitted a one page document containing personal details and work experience. Barnat did not spot any ‘red flags’, but if she had been adequately trained (in line with YMCA polices) she would have easily spotted issues in his short application: 

Lord said one of his career ambitions was ‘to work with kids and help them to experience life, love and friendships in an environment where there are no walls or boundaries’.

This sentence in an otherwise short document should have raised questions about whether Lord understood the importance of boundaries for children and his responsibilities in maintaining boundaries. Barnat also failed to follow up on Lord’s statement that he had worked in America as a Cabin Counsellor but had to leave early. If Barnat had followed YMCA procedure and checked Lord’s claims with his most recent employer she would found out that he had been the subject of an employer investigation because of suspected inappropriate behaviour at Camp America.  Barnat also did not follow up with his references, one of whom was a family member. The Royal Commission responded bluntly, dispersing any especial cunning by Lord and consequent disavowal of responsibility by YMCA: 

We do not accept that Lord infiltrated YMCA NSW. Rather, YMCA NSW let him in. Lord applied for a job and because of significant failures in recruitment, screening, management, supervision, and training, his employment continued and his conduct was not reported and he sexually abused YMCA children.

The Royal Commission reports also indicate other failures according to basic child protection procedures including unsupervised contact with children in contravention of procedures. Failure to follow up on suspicious behaviour or even just basic failure by an employee to fulfil the terms of their employment.

In his analysis of monstrous wickedness, one of Cole’s key arguments is that monsters serve a narrative function. Monsters are figures in a story in which they are given a specific and prescribed role. For Cole, the function of labelling and constructing terrorists as monsters is to create a community of fear, and to justify and require extreme responses. In the Royal Commission, a key narrative function for witnesses of constructing paedophiles as monsters is to disavow responsibility, particularly institutional responsibility. For example, in the YMCA, labelling Lord a monster was a way for management to disavow responsibility – there were no reasonable steps or procedures that they could have taken to prevent the evil and cunning Lord. He was a malevolent monster who had infiltrated their organisation and there was nothing that they could do to protect against him. 

By assigning blame to individual junior staff members and the conduct of an “insidious, secretive, devious and sophisticated… paedophile”, YMCA NSW failed to acknowledge its own significant failings. 

A mythological conception of evil individualises a serious social problem, focusing on individual pathologies and failures, rather than the social and structural context that enabled offences against children. The Royal Commission rejected this individualistic mythological conception and instead of focusing on individual sex offenders it has analysed the institutional failures that allowed, condoned or facilitated the offending behaviours. 

REJECTING THE NOTION OF PAEDOPHILES AS MONSTERS AND THE HORROR OF INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE

Whilst witnesses as individuals and as representatives of organisations may have conceptualised sex offenders as monsters – transgressive, malevolent outsiders with extraordinary powers – the Royal Commission has consistently attempted to demonsterize paedophiles and to situate sex offending behaviours and motives as predictable and comprehensible, rather than supernatural and mysterious. Accordingly, the Royal Commission has arguably sought to resist a horror reading. Despite this, there are still consistencies with the horror genre. Robin Wood has argued that the ‘true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses; its re-emergence is dramatized, as in our nightmares.’ In horror, the repressed familiar returns, unfamiliar and monstrous. The Royal Commission is an exercise in uncovering and bringing to the surface nightmares that institutions have sought to repress or oppress. In the Royal Commission, familiar, safe and cherished institutions have been rendered strange and dangerous. Williams has argued that ‘contemporary horror has specialised in making the inside visible, opening it up and bringing it out and pushing the spectacle of interiority to the limit to find out what that limit is.’ Just as in horror, the Royal Commission has opened up the inside of institutions that are normally closed to us. The innards of the institutions have been exposed – hierarchical structures, decision-making, policies and procedures. 

Horror plays on the conflicting desires to both see and look away. Many people will never watch horror, but amongst those who do, some will cover their eyes at the climactic infliction of violence to avoid seeing what they know will happen. This trait of (some) audience members is so well-known that directors play with it. Thus in The Omen (1976), the director David Walker intentionally extended the depiction of a decapitation, viewed through several different cameras, so that feeble audience members who looked away would look up and be forced to see the head being lopped off from a different angle. Horror films manipulate point of view – running and breathing with a victim, shifting to a monster’s viewpoint, then to a third person’s and then documentary observation. The dependence by the Royal Commission upon witness statements, from varying sources including victims, victim’s families, staff, management, experts and even sex offenders, similarly provides shifting viewpoints. Likewise, in the Royal Commission a constant theme has been the exploration of a tendency to look away, to avoid looking at and confronting child sexual abuse. The Royal Commission has provided the same story, over and over again, from a variety of different viewpoints to force people to hear and see. 

Both horror and the Royal Commission offer sustained meditations on wickedness – what a wrong is, who is responsible and who deserves to be punished. In the pursuit of this meditation, both horror and the Royal Commission extend beyond the concerns and evidence that would be the focus of the criminal justice system. In the hearings, the Royal Commission accepts that a witness did not have a legal duty to report suspicion of abuse, and yet witnesses are often questioned about their failure to report. These witnesses are asked about their emotional reaction and whether even in the absence of a legal duty they should have acted. This provides a richer account of culpability that goes beyond existing legal duties. 

In common with the genre of horror, the Royal Commission arouses the affect of horror. Yet the fear and disgust is not primarily aroused by the sex offenders, but by the institutional and systemic failures to adequately prevent and respond to sex offending. The very title of the Royal Commission indicates its focus – upon institutional failures. The Reports provide a deadening, depressing, distressing repetition of the same kinds of failures, over and over again. Both the genre of horror and the Royal Commission have almost a compulsive repetitiveness. Horror stories and the Royal Commission represent wrongdoing with subtle but repetitive variations on themes. A frequent theme of horror is the way in which institutions are somehow complicit with monsters. In horror, corporations may have created the monster or have protected the monster for good or nefarious purposes. In the Royal Commission, representatives of institutions may have chosen to protect the institution over and above the children they had a duty to protect, a form of institutional narcissism. Or the institution may have failed to adequately train staff to recognise grooming behaviours, have systems in place to prevent or minimise opportunities for grooming and offending, or have inadequate systems for reporting. The levels of culpability by institutions and their representatives vary greatly, from simple ignorance to active facilitation. The infliction of harm facilitated by institutional failure and the repetition over and over again of different forms of failure arouse horror. 

This then harks back to another common theme of the horror genre – that the monsters are visible and real, yet are only part of the problem. The Royal Commission marks a shift away from a mythological wickedness to something more banal, insidious and depressing. The Royal Commission provides a template of a contemporary technology of wrong doing – a bureaucratic, collectivised failure. Part of the horror is that we do not know how to adequately conceptualise and respond to this kind of collective failure. The dominant model of culpability in criminal law and society of individualised, subjective wrongdoing has diverted us away from developing a lexicon and legal account of collective culpability. The Royal Commission demonstrates the absence of, and need for, an account of collective responsibility – as we become increasingly dependent and interdependent on each other and complex organisations. The Royal Commission has highlighted an asymmetry of harm inflicted and responsibility for it: ‘the greater the suffering, the less responsibility can be established for it.’ The Royal Commission has refused to reduce responsibility and culpability solely to individuals, and yet the Commission has highlighted the absence of models of collective responsibility to apply to articulate, regulate and ascribe culpability in these examples of institutional failings. Hannah Arendt concluded her analysis of the trial of Eichmann by stating she had come to the dreadful realisation that Eichmann was ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. The Royal Commission has highlighted that these proliferations of harms due to institutional failures are terrifyingly normal. 

Many horror stories wallow in visions of disorder before order is reinstated. This reimposition of order is not always final or satisfying. Horror films represent social upheaval and chaos. They provide an exploration of what happens when the broader structures of society fail – including family, gender, life and death, and the state. Apocalyptic horror films explore the literal end that results from social decay and chaos. Similarly, the Royal Commission is an exercise in the failure of broader structures and generates a hope that some kind of order will be reinstated. The genre of horror is not immoral. It often represents a morality (albeit warped) and excites at least a desire for justice (which may or may not be delivered). Likewise, the Royal Commission excites a desire for justice, which may or may not be delivered. 

The horror genre has a ‘negative aesthetic aim’ – it is designed to disturb, and arouse fear and disgust. The Royal Commission has aroused some fear, but particularly disgust, in enunciating and detailing the harms to victims enabled by institutional failures. But what are we to do with these negative emotions? The horror genre is fictional. We know that the monsters will not leave the screen. The genre can be conservative in the reimposition and statement of order (for example, in the policing of sexual boundaries), but it can also be radical in its critique and challenge of existing boundaries. Theorists have recognised the ‘promise’ of monsters in their capacity to challenge and disrupt categories and boundaries. Monster theory celebrates and fears monsters as agents of change – representing and enacting both threat and promise. Monsters are a challenge to existing taxonomies, understandings and categories, particularly those premised on binary thinking. Binaries are products of essentializing generic categories. Those who breach and transgress boundaries can be regarded and constructed as monsters, contaminated and contaminating, and blamed for their transgression. Monsters represent difference and multiplicity rather than sameness. A common theme of monster theory is to emphasise the promise of monsters. For example, Halberstam reads monstrosity as ‘almost a queer category’:

The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.

Monster theory has been applied to disrupt distinctions such as those between human and animal and the categories of male and female. On these accounts, admixtures of genres and borders – offer political promise or a ‘reverse discourse’. 

The Royal Commission could be read as a disruptive monster. Like other Royal Commissions and inquiries in the past, this Royal Commission could have conservative or radical effects. In sheer size alone, the Royal Commission is monstrous. Originally intended to proceed for two years, it has since been extended and will continue until 2017. It has generated a mountain of transcripts, findings, reports, papers and recommendations. As a behemoth the Royal Commission is disruptive of the established order. Not only has it threatened and harmed established, cherished institutions that failed to protect children, it is also challenging established models of responsibility. It is disrupting the contemporary focus on subjective, individualised wrongdoing and considering instead collective responsibility and the culpability of institutions. In particular, the Royal Commission has aroused disgust for sustained institutional failures. Whilst some theorists have argued that disgust should never be taken into account in the legal system, disgust has the advantage of requiring and justifying a response. We can respond to the disorderly by changing the systems of order. 

The horror genre is an imaginative expression and performance of fears. Imagination is required to construct the monster – but also to defeat it. Although the Royal Commission has resoundingly rejected the idea of paedophiles as monsters there remain consistencies with horror. Much of horror is concerned with ‘a search for that discourse, that specialised form of knowledge which will enable the human characters to comprehend and so control that which simultaneously embodies and causes its “trouble”’.  The Royal Commission has a similar trajectory. It is focused upon the articulation and exploration of the powers and weaknesses of institutions and the ‘troubles’ caused by systemic failures and highlights that we will need imagination to solve the problems and go beyond existing structures.

Biographical Note