Woman challenges rejection by board of sex abuse claim

Mary Carolan
30/05/2006

A woman whose case is "possibly the most serious" of some 4,000 abuse cases before the Residential Institutions Redress Board has brought a High Court challenge to the board's rejection of her claim that she was severely sexually abused from the age of five at a residential institution in Dublin where she remained for some 10 years.

The board had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that a psychiatrist had planted in the woman's mind claims of sexual misconduct and went on to find the alleged misconduct never occurred, the court was told yesterday.

Peter Finlay SC, for the woman, said the board made its decision without any evidence that the psychiatrist in question, whom the woman had attended over many years from the 1980s, was unreliable. The woman had also made disclosures of sexual abuse to that psychiatrist prior to publication of media reports of widespread abuse in institutions here.

The board failed to consider its own psychiatric report on the woman and had drawn inferences concerning the claims of sexual abuse which were inconsistent with the evidence and also inconsistent with current medical literature on the nature and consequences of child sexual abuse and the effect of disclosure on its victims, it was also claimed.

In excess of its powers, the board had drawn adverse inferences from the woman's failure to disclose the alleged sexual abuse in the early 1970s when she was an adolescent receiving inpatient treatment at a psychiatric hospital shortly after leaving the institution, the court was told.

The board's decisions were all taken in circumstances where the sexual abuse was very severe and the psychiatrist who treated the woman was highly trained and very alert to the possibility of suggestibility, counsel added. This case, he said, involved "possibly the most serious allegations" out of the 4,000 persons who had claims before the board.

Mr Justice Michael Peart yesterday gave leave to Mr Finlay to bring judicial review proceedings challenging the board's handling of the woman's claim.

The woman was placed in a Dublin institution at the age of five and remained there until she was 16. While at the institution, she claimed she was subject to severe physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including sexual abuse by a priest, nun and lay persons.

Within two years of leaving the institution, she was treated at a psychiatric hospital in the UK but did not disclose any sexual abuse there, Mr Finlay said. However, in the 1980s, while attending another psychiatrist overseas, in the country where she now lives, she had made unprompted disclosures of sex abuse, he said.

The woman subsequently applied to the redress board for damages and, earlier this month, was awarded some ?140,000 damages for psychological and physical abuse. However, the board rejected the claims of sexual abuse a finding which, Mr Finlay said, largely arose from the fact the psychiatrist had not produced detailed notes of sessions at- tended by the woman in the 1980s.

? The Irish Times