A very difficult court case.
Audrey and her sister Joan had been evacuated from London during WW2 to a private school Lancelot Andrewes, a Church of England Boarding School near Ely in Cambridgeshire. Their parents had died in a raid, and as the girls had no other living relatives, they remained at the school until they completed their education.
After marrying, Audrey returns to the area with her husband, and as she is the deputy administrator for the diocese, her daughter, Emily can attend the school with a special bursary given to employees. All goes well until suddenly there is a massive change in Emily's behaviour and she tells her parents that she has been sexually abused by men wearing masks.
This news opens a floodgate of recovered memory for Audrey and goes a long way to explain why her sister had committed suicide. Fr Gerrard, a highly respected member of the church, had singled Audrey out when she was aged between seven and twelve to be molested by men, and now all these years later, he’s done the same to her daughter.
This is one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read. It deals with the court case where Emily and Audrey are the main witnesses against not only Fr Gerrard but some very prominent members of society. They were not the only two girls abused but trying to get others who had also been abused, to come forward proved to be an uphill battle.
The case took place in the 1970s when recovered memories were only just beginning to be understood and when people in “high places” were able to hide their depraved behaviour far easier than now. Of course, as mentioned by the author Peter Murphy, the floodgates of abuse carried out not only in the Anglican Church, and dare I say especially the Roman Catholic church had not yet been opened. There was a trickle of cases that led to more and more people coming forward, and accusations of this type of institutionalised abuse started grabbing the headlines. The laws at the time weren't conducive to helping the victims
Will we ever uncover the full extent of the abuse that happened behind the closed doors of convents, or priests abusing their young parishioners, or babies snatched from their unmarried mothers? Will all the abusers ever be brought to trial? I think that as the title of the book says (there’s one law for them) and there’s one law for the rest of us.
Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.
