Victims and bureaucrats an unhappy mix

OPINION: A new complaint about ACC comes at a bad time for its controversial new sexual abuse claims regime. If it's not a fake, it shows that bureaucrats and sensitive claims can make for a lousy combination.

Internal emails apparently written by Accident Compensation Corporation staff, and denigrating a client with sexual abuse issues, have been shown to a Sunday newspaper.

According to the complainant they were leaked to her by someone on the staff, which ACC denies, though it has previously apologised to the woman for correspondence about her that contained what it called "negative information and inappropriate content".

If the emails are real, they are shockers. The woman is described as a "mental health nutter"; the suicide of one of her children on finding out she was the product of incest is mentioned with the comment, "No wonder, with a birth mother like this one!"; and a staff member who supports the woman is described as believing she is, "the most wonderful miracle of the world and testament to rehabilitation and all that other babble. Silly bugger, she must have conned him as well."

The email continues, "We should have got rid of her a long time ago, one less nutter on our books."

The woman has been dealing with ACC since the 1980s. She fell pregnant to her father three times, the first at the age of 11. He was convicted of incest and jailed.

There are two ways to go with this, and either reflects the complexity and sadness of the whole subject of sexual abuse and the harm it does. If these are real emails, there have been people within ACC, and in its most sensitive area, whose attitudes to confidential information are appallingly unprofessional. If the emails are concocted, that suggests the lasting effect of incest on a vulnerable child who has become a dysfunctional adult.

Either way, the complaint confirms what we should never doubt - that sexual abuse is not some welfare-generated industry designed to sucker the taxpayer, but a social problem causing pain and harm to many people, a good many of whom will not recover from it within the 16 therapy or counselling sessions ACC now regards as optimal, and yet more of whom will never get that help.

We're a weird society where the subject of sexual abuse is concerned. On one hand we join in outraged condemnation of the Catholic Church, but on the other we tend to view the problem - when we have to pay for it - as an elaborate con dreamed up by people who relish spending pointless hours in therapy or counselling. Along with this must go a matching belief that those working in the field - doctors, psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists, social workers - happily perpetuate the con, presumably because of the money they make from this demanding and emotionally draining work.

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It's an interesting conspiracy theory, but I don't buy it. More likely, we introduced compensation for sexual abuse as part of ACC, but had no idea how extensive the problem would turn out to be. Maybe initial cash handouts for victims weren't the brightest move; wherever there's free cash people will make themselves entitled to it; but having stopped that, it would surely be churlish to put up barriers to what help remains.

Cost-cutting seems the logical explanation for ACC changing its rules, though, making it harder for victims to get assessed, and slowing down that process by drastically narrowing the number of experts it deems capable of diagnosing what it now says has to be "mental injury".

The system sounds cumbersome and insensitive, and angry therapists have walked away from the work for that reason. According to Labour's Victims Rights spokesperson, Lynne Pillay, only 32 people were approved nationally for sexual abuse counselling in the first two months of this year, compared with 472 in the same time last year. What's that supposed to suggest? That the other 440 were lying, or that although they were traumatised enough to seek help, they were not "mentally injured"?

If this is economising, it's short- sighted. Victims won't just go away because bureaucracy wants them to, harm doesn't evaporate spontaneously, though we wish it did, and one way or another we're bound to pay for our lack of belief in "rehabilitation and all that other babble".

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