Anyone can be found Image: Shutterstock In my work as a researcher looking into matters of historical child sexual abuse, I’m often called upon to ‘find’ a person accused of sexually assaulting a child, an event which may have occurred many years in the past. But let me first define…

On the remains of love I found this amongst my mother’s possessions. A greeting card sent with flowers from my dad to my mum on the occasion of my birth. I don’t know much about my father, Frank Jordan, who disappeared from my life early on, and although I was…

A confronting documentary looking at the work of Task Force Argos, an Australian police unit dedicated to tracing online child sex predators, and their victims: the children in the pictures. If you can handle the subject matter, then I can recommend the documentary (and associated podcast), The Children in the…

The recent edits to Dahl’s children’s stories are an insult to storytelling itself. It’s one thing to make minor edits to fiction to reflect changes in taste and meaning. It’s another thing entirely to rewrite or add new writing to a work, which alters the author‘s original vision and intention. …

Feb 17, 2023 · 9 min read Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash. Author’s note: this piece is a partial memoir of the work I do with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Despite the title, it is NOT intended as a guide to interviewing survivors of sexual trauma. Please…

As appalling as the case of rapist police officer David Carrick is, I hope the 30 year jail sentence for the former London officer, brings some sense of justice, peace and stability back to the lives of his many victims. I realise it is not going to repair the harm…

Good riddance to an arch-tormentor The death of George Pell, an undoubted paedophile predator and instigator of a slick financial cover-up that saved the Vatican millions in liabilities payouts, brings to an end a disgraceful and profoundly immoral chapter in the history of the Catholic Church. Pell, 81 when he…

‘Memories are the things you don’t want to take home’ — DI Jon Rouse. It’s not often that I hold the police up as heroes, but the case of Detective Inspector Jon Rouse of the Queensland Police Service, demands an exception. Retiring after 40 years’ police service, DI Rouse has…

Not much has changed at the top in Russia When he was writing his history of the great conflict in which he had played such a decisive role, Winston Churchill had cause to reflect on the nature of political leadership during a time of war. With both triumph and disaster…