The Public inquiry will never succeed until it is led by someone who has experience sexual abuse.
The Inquiry needs to have legal representation, and a lot of it. But fundamentally this is about the lives of people who were abused symmetrically by people, who were sheltered by organisations.
Who is going to step forward and say “Hey, I was abused” from the legal elite these people are selected? Talented as they have been, that’s all the people we’ve had so far leading this inquiry have failed to do.
I came clean about the sexual abuse I suffered by my grandfather in my mid-twenties. It was quite honestly the worst conversation to have with your parents. My paternal grandfather had died a few years before. The fact is most sexual abuse takes place in family. Which family (and this is what the legal elite is) is going to stand up and say one of their family abused them? I suspect very few.
I’m so pleased the news has broken about the abuse in football. Kicking away the idea that football is the “beautiful game”. It’s not more beautiful than the Catholic Church, or the people who “looked the other way” when Jimmy Savill’s abused so many young, innocent people.
For this inquiry to have any credibility with the survivors of the organisations that are to be investigated – the leader needs to be have been touched personally (quite literally) like the people they are fighting for.
For once I am proud of those brave football players (I’m not a fan of the homophobic, misogynistic game) – they are breaking down barriers by exposing the horror that has been buried deep inside them for year.
So who is going to stand up and be counted and lead this inquiry out of the disaster that it is?
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