Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 760: There is A Revolution Happening with Grace Tame

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Episode 760: There is A Revolution Happening with Grace Tame · The Trauma Therapist

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All right, welcome back to the Trauma Therapists podcast. My name is gat
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Meckferson. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to
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be human, to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big
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believer in who we are is more important than what we know, and this
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requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn
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more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist Project dot com.
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That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. So five
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four, three, two and one. All right, folks, welcome back
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to the podcast. I am thrilled and honor deef as my guests today.
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Grace Aim Grace, welcome to the podcast. Hi guy, how are you
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going? I'm doing great so. Grace Team is an Australian activist and advocate
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for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Her book is titled The Ninth Life of
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a Diamond Minor, a memoir. She's founder of the Grace Team Foundation and
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not for profit organization established a campaign for and help fund initiatives which work to
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prevent and respond to sexual abuse of children and others. Twenty twenty one she
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was named Australian of the Year. Wow. All right, Grace, welcome
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to the podcast. Thanks for having me on. You are welcome. It's
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an it's quite an introduction. I feel a little bit like an impostor,
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to be honest, and perhaps that's the shame that the shame mechanism that still
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sort of lives on in survivors, especially of child sexual abuse, when it's
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imprinted in the you know, in all of the cells, which is sort
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of something that you know about dealing with trauma, That trauma is something that
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is cellular. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We'll
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get into that, but before we do, share with our listeners Grace,
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where you're from originally and where you are currently. I'm from Tasmania, which
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is an island state of Australia, and I'm in Sydney at the moment for
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the Sydney Writers Festival touring the book, the memoir that I wrote at the
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ripe age of twenty stevs. I've packed a lot of years. The end
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of the years, I've had in some ways nine lives. That's sort of
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a play on you know, at their ninth life, but it's also a
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nod. The title of the book is also a nod to one of the
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many characters in the crowd of people that I've intersected with at this point in
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time in my ongoing life. I am not religious in the dogmatic sense.
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However, I sort of tend to I'm a believer in the sort of inherent
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religiosity of spirituality, if you will. So I believe that we're all sort
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of just traveling through and intersecting with different cross sections of humanity, you know,
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experientially speaking in terms of the places that we visit as well. And
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when I was nineteen years old, I was actually with a friend of mine
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who's no longer with us, Christian, who traveled. We traveled together to
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Portugal, and he and I had met when I was living in Santa Barbara
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in California, and we met this guy, George, who was a literal
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diamond miner at one stage in his life, and he'd also lived nine lives.
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So yeah, I tend to take that philosophy with me. We can
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we're not defined by any one thing. We're not defined by anyone experience,
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especially the negative things. And you know, I sort of was launched in
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Australia was launched onto this very public platform about two and a half years ago.
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Now, even though I started doing the work that I do in terms
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of child protection, in terms of advocacy for the rights of fellow child sexually
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abuse survivors, you know, about six years ago. And I guess people
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a lot of people in their consciousness, I was perhaps born at that point.
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But really, you know, for me, the weight of the positive
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experience is still usurp all the negative things that have happened, or at least
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I try to lean into the positivity. It can be really hard, yeah,
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but I think it's a real a powerful perspective to have and to hold
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and to nurture. Let me let me ask you how how did all this
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start? What the heck happened the advocacy or yeah, how did you get
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to this point? Well? It's interesting because you know, my life has
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been there's not been a lot of design to it, or there has been
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in a way. I've had some aspirations and some intention to do certain things,
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and then there's also been quite a lot of spontaneity and randomness, which
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is really good. But it was back in twenty seventeen March of twenty seventeen
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that I was contacted by a journalist. Her name's Nina Fanell. She's an
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incredible journalist who specializes or she does a lot of reporting in the area of
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sexual assault. She's a survivor of sexual assault herself, and she had reached
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out to me while I was still living in California. I was actually living
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in Los Angeles at that time. She had reached out to me because the
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perpetrator of the child sexual abuse was at that point out of prison and attending
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Grindley University campus. That is actually no, there's a couple of campuses,
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but there's only one university in Tasmania. And my mother, like my father,
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both of my parents had grown up quite poor. They're working class.
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They had been working class when they grew up. And my mother had never
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gone to university as a young woman. You know, her family didn't have
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enough money to sit there. Only where I would have send the youngest thor
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the eldest of her siblings, her sisters. She's one of nine sisters.
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So my mother was a mitior age student at that time as well. But
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there were sort of lots of injustices. So this man who was at that
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point, a sixty year old convicted child sex offender was also sharing student accommodation
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with like eighteen year old undergraduate students, and that accommodation had shared shower facilities.
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And also there were allegations made that included he would sit on the university
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gym equipment for hours at a time, including the exercise bikes that overlooked the
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early Learning Center where some of the students from my high school where he had
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taught and perpetrated the abuse against me as a fifteen year old when he was
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fifty eight, whether some of those students were doing the experience, and also
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that he would you know, sit at the in the chemistry common room where
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he was doing his PhD in the chemistry department, and he had a quote
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unquote type and that type was blonde, petite, and blue eyed like me.
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And so it wasn't that he was just there. It was that he
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was still continuing to make people on this campus uncomfortable. And you know,
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it was sort of later expressed. Someone asked the question, well, would
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you have him babysit your kids, and everyone sort of resoundingly said no,
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this is a convicted child sex offender. And also a child sex offender who
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was found with you know, a twenty eight multimedia files of child abuse material
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that included videos of adults raping children, and you know, like a folder
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that had a cachet of photographs of other students at the high school throughout his
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tenure of topless girls, you know, and you know, he's quite a
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conniving man. And my mother had expressed her discomfort. And then also what
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happened in twenty sixteen, so the year before I had been contacted by this
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journalist, is that he had permitted another crime. He had boasted about his
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offenses against me. He had described me as a demented weasel, and he
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had minimized his crimes and referred to himself as enviable. And then he had
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actually served another prison sentence, so he technically had three child sexual abuse related
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defenses. And it was the first case of somebody being charged in Australia with
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producing child exploitation material in descriptive form. And it's straight from the pedophile script,
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because you know what pedophiles are. I mean, technically he doesn't like
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being called a pedophile because they say it's you know, they like to make
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distinctions that you know, unless it's somebody up to the age of thirteen,
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and you know, but you know, it's straight from the child sex offender
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playbook that if it's like it's if it's in the form of text or an
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image or a video or a doll or otherwise considered to be not real,
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it doesn't hurt anyone. And you know, and this is like the continuation,
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and we often see this in child protection is that you know, behind
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the scenes, and we deal with this a lot because at the foundation,
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one of the things that we do, besides the education and the pursuit of
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structural reform, so legal reform, is that we philanthropically support a law firm
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to pay for the legal work of child sexual abuse survivors. And you'll find
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that these stories, like the actual the stories go on for decades sometimes because
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there'll be the contact offending in of itself and the grooming, you know,
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for the child when they were young, and then they will be dragged through
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these awful, awful legal battles that aren't necessarily initiated by the child, or
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there will just be like all this sort of behind the scenes continuation of like
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menacing, harassing through all these different apparatuses like obviously now we have you know,
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and we didn't necessarily have this back in like the sixties and seventies when
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you had a lot of clergy abuse and all this sort of like crime rings
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organized crime, because that's what pedophilia really is. He is an organized crime
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in a lot of cases. But you know, you'll see these you'll see
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these perpetrators just not let go, like they just cannot let go because there
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are certain like character types, and so that's what we were sort of seeing
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here is this this like continuation of the injustice. And so you know,
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in twenty seventeen, both my mother and I were contacted by this journalist and
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like I was only twenty two then, so I was still very young.
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And yet it was still seven years after and we'd had two criminal like well
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yeah, two separate prison sentences, and he'd served two prison sentences. And
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you know, the first the first instance was him he admitted to like just
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offhand, he said, oh yeah, you know, it was thirty thirty
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times. And when he said that, what he meant by that was thirty
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counts of statutory rape of a minor. And I was again, like I
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was fifteen and he was fifty eight and it was a very dark thing that
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happened. You know. It was him having taught me as a fourteen year
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old in a class of only eight students in advanced maths, and I had
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been severely anorexic at that time. I actually took six weeks off during that
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year. That was during the abuse. That was so that was in the
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lead up. So in two thousand and nine, I was fourteen that whole
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year. I'm born in December, and we have a different school year to
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you in the States, So our school year starts at the beginning of the
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calendar year and then it ends at Christmas time, just before Christmas. So
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I was fourteen that whole year, and he was you know, in retrospect,
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it was clear that he had his eye on me and he would,
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you know, he would come up to me and he would say things that
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he was notorious. So so a bit of background on him. He was
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a soldier before he was a teacher, you know, and he was he
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was outrageous. That was his part of his hiding in plain sight is that
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he shocked everybody into a desensitized state. And you know, it was it
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was on the principal's statement that he was, you know, using the school's
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resources to conduct his own ponzi scheme. He was running his own amway business
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out of the school, and you know, and he was known for like
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one of the things he did was at one point, because he was head
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of maths and science, so he had to you know, give sometimes talks
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to visiting teachers or you know, people came to the school and he made
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a speech with like really racist undertones or probably overtones knowing him, and there
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were planks that were made. But then he issued a grievance, you know,
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he would he like it was that as you you probably know the acronym
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DAVO the deny attack and reverse victim, and that that that sort of flipping
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of the coin between entitlement on the one hand, but then as soon as
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the as soon as you're held to account, you just it's the disentitlement like
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how dare you? How dare you accuse me? And it's that classic gas
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light and and he was very much like that. And it's not so much
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hypocrisy is almost just like this amnesic like you know, character change, which
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is like it it's funny to me. It's like the Harvey Weinstein turning up
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to court with the zimmer frame, like have you completely forgotten who you are?
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It's supposed to be this big bully boss boy, like you know,
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just like pick Ones, You're not fooling anyone. It's as good as like
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going to the you know, the costume shop and getting a missed the potato.
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Just sorry, I just I want like it's like a trench code,
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Get a trench code. But yeah, it's those are those are sort of
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the things that he did. And that year when I look back on that
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year in two thousand and nine, as I was saying, there were lots
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of signs that even though I had always thought that the grooming had started in
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early twenty ten when I was fifteen, because it was two thousand and ten
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that the physical abuse did take place, it was clear that the you know,
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and this is the thing, this is this is what is so insidious
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about grooming and difficult to unpack for children, and it is, I guess
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and we you know, I said Ponzi scheme before, and we see that,
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you know, like Jeffrey Epstein and a lot of these offenders, the
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Ponzi scheme is actually quite a good metaphor for child sexual abuse or the three
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cup Monty, because what offenders do is they take parts of your soul and
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parts of yourself, you know, in those sort of blackmail rings, and
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blackmail is part of child sexual abuse, the blackmail, the bribery, the
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soliciting of images of information, and then they sort of shift it around and
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hide it in all of these places. That often for child sexual abuse survivors,
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Like the average time it takes for a survivor to disclose is twenty three
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point nine years. Now, that's because what you're having to do is not
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just grow up, but to try and put all the pieces of the puzzle
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together. And that involves all of these different pieces or people who are part
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of this very complex ecosystem, like this system of failsafes, and often people
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don't actually know that they're part of they're part of it. Let me just
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pause here for a second. I want to remind you when them was speaking
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with Grace team without break here for a second and think are sponsors all right?
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Grace, Let me just ask you a question here, at what point
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did you disclose this? Did you speak out and to whom? Well?
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I and this makes me quite an anomaly. I suppose, given what I
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just said about the average time on twenty three point nine years that it takes
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for a child's actually be survivor to disclose. I spoke out when I was
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still at school, and I disclosed to another teacher of mine, so when
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I was in grade eleven. So what happened was the abuse started in the
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about the middle of like. The physical abuse started in the like about the
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middle of twenty ten. It continued on until the end of twenty ten.
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But the stalking, you know, this man would drive sometimes to my workplace
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and sit outside in his car. He would drive to my house and he
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would sit outside at night in his car. He also in year eleven.
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When I started in year eleven, knew my timetable, and sometimes I would
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just look over my shoulder and he would be in the doorway, or he
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would make an excuse to talk to whoever was teaching my class, and he
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would stand at the front of the room and he would be speaking to the
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teacher but making eye contact with me. It was very very creepy, Like,
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this is a very very creepy person. This is somebody who went up
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to one of my friends, Megan, who got her septem pierced once and
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he actually touched her nose and said, you're like one of the tribal women
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I killed, like he's and this, but this was like he just said
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this stuff all the time, like at the end of two thousand and eight.
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To give you an example, this is how well known it was at
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the end of two thousand and eight. So, you know, how do
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you guys do this in the US where there's a review like the you know
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at the end of year, like the twelves will do a review and they'll
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do like a they'll send up the staff and students. Yeah. Sure.
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The year twelve review at the end of two thousand and eight eight included a
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joke at his expense. So one of the Year twelve actors on stage answered
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a mock phone that rang, and they said, mister Bester, that's his
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name. They said, mister Bester, it's for you. It's God.
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She says she's black. That's how widely known his racism and bigotry and sexism
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generally were. And everybody laughed because he was just like that. You know.
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He had a something wrong with his wrist one time and somebody asked him,
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you know what happened, and he said, I fell out of bed
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having a threesome. He just said that stuff, you know, did mister
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s I mean, came out later sort of came out later though. Everyone
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was kind of just like, oh yeah, well, you know, he
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just he like that, we kind of knew that. And then when I
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I, you know, I wrote my book, I then like, I
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started speaking out more and more, and eventually I did receive contact from other
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What did you tell first, Oh, yeah, sorry, I tell I
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told I told my I told my English teacher, mister Simon, who was
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new to the institution. See this is a key part. So he was
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he had moved to the school, I believe about it, only a couple
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of years prior, and he told us a story, an anecdote about,
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you know, a teacher who had essentially like essentially the premise of the anecdote
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was that, you know, it was about putting people. It was about
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putting people before principles in necessary case as you know, in order to save
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lives and especially the lives of children. And it was about putting individuals before
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institutions. And I remembered that anecdote I had. I had that in the
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back of my mind. I also know well and mister Simon, mister Simon
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is gay, and so I also had in the back of my mind that
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this person would have experienced ostracism, discrimination and he had no he had no
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entrenched loyalty to this institution. And whilst I believe in you know, respecting,
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you know, like traditions, and this especially especially in this day and
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age, where I do sort of mourn the fragmentation of like the family unit
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in some in some ways as someone who's comes from a very big family,
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a very close family, despite the fact that you know, like we have
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our own you know, every family I think has its own troubles. I
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think, like, I think there's a there's a need to sort of respect
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those sorts of things, but not not if it's like just for the sake
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of it, because that is what it enables a lot of abuse, and
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abuses know that, and I think that he knew that as well. I
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think he was really banking on that because it's it's it's one of the things
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that like, you know, we've seen it again and in the work that
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we do, And so I had that in the back of my mind.
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I had that in the back of my mind, and yeah, I disclosed
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to him in early twenty and eleven. But there was Yeah, there was
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like a lot of stuff that I guess we weren't told by the by the
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school because it's sort of only it's only again we've we've only had to piece
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together all these lits, little bits and pieces, like we didn't know at
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the time of the existence of this other folder of girls that had that,
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that had their tops off. We didn't we didn't know that. The first
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complaint that was made against him was in nineteen ninety two, six months after
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he arrived at the school, and I was born in nineteen ninety four.
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Wow, and that was like learning these things has been incredibly distressing to hear,
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you know, especially because you know what happens, and this is driven
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by perpetrators, is that you are made into you were painted as the aggressor,
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you were made into the villain. And you constantly ask yourself that,
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like there's the part of me that goes, you know, like I was
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good at maths, right, I love numbers, and I'm like, damn,
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maybe if I wasn't good at maths as a thirteen year old, you
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know, like that that's my crime. Is like, ah, I'm good
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to math. It's your fault. You're implicit in it somehow. Let me
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let me ask you how as this was going on, and even in the
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week of it, how did you manage how did you cope's and what's helped
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you as you've move through this journey. For me, it's just staying grounded
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as grounded as one possibly can in simple values. I think simplicity is one
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of the most overlooked and underrated commodities, not to speak in capitalists speak in
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today's world. So I really think human beings are cognitive misers who love to
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over complicate things and over analyze things. I mean, I'm guilty of that
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myself, but that's just because I'm an avid reader and I like to eat
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books, not literally obviously, and that would be so as this was going
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on, you were just trying to stay grounded as best you could, whatever
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that meant for. Oh, I mean, look, that took a while.
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Life was pretty tough after that. It really was like, did I
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really didn't understand I didn't know what the word grooming was until twenty twenty two,
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sorry, until twenty twenty two, until twenty seventeen, sort of what
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started this whole journey was for me, knowledge is power. You know,
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knowledge, information and narrative are two of the most powerful tools, and they
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are withheld by these you know, by the by the by the biggest you
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know, covert power holders, by by by by the operators. And silence
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and secrecy is how these how these perpetrators, how these abuses operate. And
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for me, openness, communication, education, those things are key, those
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things are paramount. And so I find something out, I just want to
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share it with everyone. I don't want to keep it to myself. I'm
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not very good at keeping things to myself. And secrecy is like the foundation
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of grooming, right, that operant, the conditioning, that system of reward
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and punishment, which I find personally really odd. Of teaching children of like,
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you know, do something good and then you get a treat or like,
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you know, do something bad and then you're That can be really problematic
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because you teach kids through that mechanism, and uh, it is the foundation
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of of grooming. Really, of secrets, blackmail, bribery, and I
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mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, how the hell do
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you get through this? I mean, it's it's enough to make your head
28:33
explode. Yeah, I mean, how did was there a point where you
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said I need to see someone, I need to see a therapist or whomever?
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How did what? Who helped you? What helped you? I mean
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there there There have been a lot of times in my life where I have
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wanted to give up and I wouldn't have been able to do it if it
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weren't for people like my mother and you know, and yeah, in many
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ways, my dad, who you know, black, and my family.
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You know, I've got a wealth of cousins, you know, Like I
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said before, my mum is one of nine sisters, she's and she's right
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in the middle of them. So she's got four older four sisters and then
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four younger half sisters. And then there's like heaps of us cousins and running
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as well. So I'm a I'm a marathon runner. And that's really good.
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That moving meditation. I'm quite a peripatetic person, not in terms of
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the necessarily the principles of Aristotle, but like the practice of like needing to
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move to think and release. There's that chroma release by moving. And I
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did a lot of yoga as well. And one's relationship to different releases can
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change over time, you know. But reading and again, like doing things
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that are kind of like simple, sometimes you just need to be able to
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say, excuse my English, this is shit. And that's not out of
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self pity, that's just being really realistic and pragmatically, you know. And
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like I said, knowledge is power, and I don't mean knowledge from necessarily
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institutional like sort of standard. I like to do my own reading and cross
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reference things because you can find that what the mainstream wants us to know and
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think and feel isn't necessarily good for us. So at what point did you
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get to the stage where you were like, all right, I need to
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start speaking out on a more broad level. I mean, I want to
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I want to start helping other people. Oh, I've always been motivated by
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that. I mean, I'm autistic, and it's I didn't I didn't even
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realize that autism. There's this like whole thing about autism having like autistic sense
31:22
of injustice, and I was like, oh, not always. I mean,
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like I don't know, I have this like human impulse. It's like
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this impulse to connect and help and educate. And but on the level of
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child sexual survivors, sexual abuse, survivors. Well, when I when I
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learned the word grooming, I was equal parts validated and confronting. Now that
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that what I came across was this framework, if you will, or it
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was a it was a list of six stages, not that they happen one
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after the other. Although you know, not very many things in life are
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absolute or map neatly, you know, because life's like that, you know,
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it's this amorphous, nebulous thing that's nature. But this this thing that
32:28
I saw, this grooming explainer which Elizabeth lg. Glick put together with another
32:36
and I think it was Georgia M. Winters as well. These two,
32:39
I think they're both American, in a paper had come up with this delineation
32:47
of this process of psychological manipulation employed by perpetrators of child sexual abuse to prepare
32:58
the child for the physical offending. And I read it and my first thought
33:07
was why did nobody tell me about that? And with that came well,
33:14
we should tell everyone about this, because it was as if perpetrators had this
33:22
knowledge and nobody else did. Because also the perpetrator who abused me. My
33:29
parents had had two meetings with the school in early twenty ten when they were
33:36
aware that he had been inviting me into his office for long winded conversations because
33:42
I didn't have anything I thought to hide at that point. I would go
33:47
home and say to my mum and dad separately, albeit my parents have been
33:53
separated since I was two years old, but I would tell them, I
33:58
know I was talking to mister Best for however long today. You know he
34:01
invited me into his office or this, you know whatever, because I just
34:06
say say things, and so I wasn't concealing anything at that point. And
34:14
my parents, you know, my father was a high school teacher, and
34:19
he in particular thought it was very inappropriate. So yeah, big reflex and
34:27
so like so I when I read these these stages of grooming of child grooming
34:36
in twenty seventeen, I was I felt compelled to pass this knowledge on,
34:43
but not just pass this knowledge on in a dry academic way, because this
34:49
is part of the problem as well, is that it's almost like there's there's
34:52
a lot of there's a lot of siloing. So you'll see that academics often
34:58
they get stuck in their sort of academic language in their academic world, and
35:01
they forget that like they know what they're talking about and that they know this
35:06
stuff and that then they try to translate it to everybody else and they can't.
35:15
But it's also not connected to a real story, a real human It's
35:20
just the academia and it's just sort of goes around in circles and had I
35:27
had an experience that fit directly several experiences that fit directly into each one of
35:35
those, and it just illuminated so much. And I've been able to add
35:39
to that and build on it, and yeah, I've sort of adapted that
35:45
framework constantly. Has there been a lot of pushback here in the States in
35:54
this I thought you're gonna say, as they made a lot of bush back
36:00
the Yeah, well here in the States, you know, there there were
36:05
when people speak out, when women speak out, women predominantly speak out,
36:09
there's a lot of pushback. Have you experienced anything like that? Yeah?
36:15
Oh, so, what does it look like? I'm in another criminal trial
36:19
at the moment with the same perpetrator who abused me here. I'm sorry,
36:27
I don't mean to laugh, but I'm laughing at the question. Has there
36:32
been a lot of pushback? There has been a significant amount of pushback.
36:36
Yes, oh yeah, oh yeah, I've been chased home. I've like,
36:45
like car chase, chased home, had a thug get out of a
36:50
car while I was still in it in the driveway. My both my mom
36:53
and step dad saw the car drive away and the thug got out, bashed
36:59
your the window, called me a fucking oh yeah, oh yeah. I
37:02
mean we've had my fiance and I had somebody go like tip out our recycling
37:10
being go through our recycling being people in cars, you know, stationary outside
37:16
of their house, the cage rattling sort of stuff. But you get get
37:22
used to it and sort of you know. My response to that is,
37:24
there are far simpler, less elaborate ways to tell us that you've got to
37:30
really sad life to meeting. In twenty twenty one, you were named Australian
37:44
of the Year. How did that come up? I mean, congratulates,
37:50
Come on, that's amazing. It's pretty. Yeah, it's a strange,
37:54
very strange thing and it's strange, but it's amazing. I mean, it's
38:00
incredible. How did that come about for you? Yeah? So I wish
38:07
I could translate that to you in a small in a microcosmic wow. So
38:20
in the middle of twenty twenty, after so I'd been living. I'd been
38:24
living in the US for quite a while, and COVID hit in early twenty
38:30
twenty and I returned and I was just like I was living with my aunt.
38:35
I was an unemployed advocate, I suppose and yeah, And then in
38:39
the middle of twenty twenty, I got a phone call from the journalist Nina
38:45
Fanell, who sort of created and runs these two campaigns. One is called
38:53
hashtag let Her Speak and the other is called hashtag let us Speak. And
38:58
those campaigns are law reform campaigns aimed at giving power back to child sexual abuse
39:05
survivors. And mine was the test case, the first case for the let
39:12
Her Speak campaign back in twenty seventeen. That's how Nina and I got to
39:16
know each other. She had been the journalist, as I mentioned before,
39:19
who had reached out to me, and Nina Fanell just said, oh,
39:23
I'm thinking about nominating view for Australian of the Year. And I had no
39:29
concept of what Australian of the Year really was. I really didn't know very
39:31
much. I was also really quite anorexic at the time. I have dealt
39:38
with anarexia, which is very much also a manifestation of autistic restrictive eating disorder.
39:47
I first experienced it back in twenty two thousand and nine, as I
39:54
mentioned before, where I'd spent six weeks in hospital, I had been tube
39:59
fed. I weighed about forty forty kilos at that time. But yeah,
40:05
twenty twenty, I was probably about forty five kilos and I was running obsessively.
40:09
I was running like one hundred and ten kilometers a week, and so
40:15
I was also just a bit disconnected from everything and it didn't really land in
40:21
my head. I was preoccupied with mostly with running. And yeah, about
40:28
four five months later or less than that, Yeah, it would have been
40:30
four months later. I suppose I was named Tasmanian of the Year first.
40:35
And what happens is all of the state winners. We've got eight states and
40:39
territories in Australia. All of the state winners then go to Canberra in January
40:46
and you don't know who's going to win what they call the Big Gong because
40:53
there's also four different categories. So there's Local Hero, Young Australian of the
41:00
Year, Senior Australian of the Year, and the Australian of the Year,
41:07
the Overall Australian of the Year, and I genuinely had no idea because they
41:13
make everyone write a speech. And I remember like sitting there and seeing the
41:17
other recipients with their speeches ready to go, and I had my speech ready
41:22
to go, and it's pretty nerve racking. And I remember like my fiance
41:30
Max and I like we were just we were two twenty six year old kids
41:37
who really had no concept of what was about to happen. We were living
41:42
in a sharehouse at the time. We had just got ridden, got had
41:46
to get rid of our broken bed frame at the time, so it was
41:49
sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Just so it was like okay,
41:55
you know, like Max, when I had arrived and we were kind of
41:59
you know, take in the hubub of everything. Everyone who was nominated and
42:02
involved in the program is staying in the one hotel and they had like a
42:07
marquee set up at the front of the in the lobby, and at one
42:09
point Max is walking around and with no shoes on, and I was like,
42:13
you know, like put some shoes on kind of thing, like and
42:17
yeah, and it just it just exploded, Like our lives just just went
42:23
nuts after that, because there's just so much that I would imagine it would
42:30
be obviously a shot of adrenaline for your platform right to help help people help.
42:37
And that's and that's the thing that's really special is that what it did
42:43
for the community of child sexual abuse survivors in terms of a lot of a
42:50
lot of their experiences have by association, by proxy, because a lot of
42:57
these institutions are out put under so much pressure and they all look at me
43:00
and they go, oh that the little girl actually, and I'm like,
43:05
okay, that's fine, you know, And that's but that's that's what's really
43:09
wonderful. That's what's really wonderful is that because you know, whilst you can't
43:16
take away from the awful horrors of a lot of these crimes, like they're
43:22
dark, you know, and extent that a lot of people don't want to
43:25
admit it. You know, a lot of and a lot of these news
43:30
you guys have in America, of course, you've got the same You've got
43:32
News Corp. You know, like you've got Fox. These tabloid outlets do
43:37
this sort of thing where they create, they create, how they create a
43:40
distance between the reader and these actual events is too. They will say things
43:50
like, oh, it's like a movie or it was like, you know,
43:52
it's like a fantasy or something, and I'm like, child's actually,
43:53
abuse is not. It happens every day. And what they're doing is they're
43:59
trying to get you to not actually empathize while still sucking you in for clicks.
44:06
And they want to also gaslight the victims into feeling like they're insane.
44:14
And the what we've done is we've given so much power back as a collective
44:23
to these survivors to band together who previously also didn't necessarily know where to find
44:32
each other, and then kind of collectively hold each other's hands, not just
44:38
in a proverbial sense, but literally. And that's it's just like you know,
44:45
you can you can feel it. You can feel it when you go
44:49
into rooms to events, and it is kind of the stuff of revolution,
44:54
and you know, you're seeing the like again, these big heads, you
45:00
monic sort of forces trying to do sneaky things like go, oh, we're
45:05
bankrupt, and you know, we can't we can't pay the we can't pay
45:08
the fees, we can't pay the compensation for the survivors and this sort of
45:14
stuff, and we're going no, no, no, you know, time's
45:17
up now, times up. Now, you really do have to face these
45:22
decades and like, up to these decades and decades and decades and decades of
45:24
things that we know that what you've done, and it's a thing to witness
45:31
as we kind of wind down here Greece. Would you say that that that's
45:37
your mission in a sense to say, you know what, No, now's
45:42
the time to speak up, now's the time to listen, to listen.
45:47
Well, yeah, So on the one hand, there's the dealing with the
45:50
stuff that's happened, and that's really important. But my mission is to protect
45:54
children. My mission is to protect boys and girls from abuse that should never
46:00
actually have to happen in the first place. And that's the like, that's
46:02
the ultimate purpose, right, That's what life is about, is being here
46:07
and living for each other children of the future. You know, the best
46:14
hope for setting a particular path in motion is to invest in children, invest
46:22
in education, right, prevention. And it's hard to do, but if
46:32
you do it right, when people say, oh, buy ones by well
46:38
by child protection measures, So how specifically are you doing that through your foundation?
46:45
How are you protecting kids? Well? At the moment, we're in
46:51
the developmental phases of some really specific education modules that are tailored for under fives.
47:00
After that, you've got different age groups, you know, because there's
47:05
lots of different schools of thought obviously, and you'll see, you know,
47:07
certain certain groups will argue against educating, you know, different demographics about certain
47:17
things, and there are concerns about quote unquote maybe corrupting children, and that's
47:27
that is certainly not the aim at all. You know, you can't teach
47:30
calculus five year old, right, so the same principle applies. One wouldn't
47:35
be teaching grooming to a young children young children. But it's simple things like
47:40
like the concept of autonomy can translate, like in the early stages to things
47:47
like teaching young children that they don't have to if they don't want to or
47:52
don't feel comfortable, don't feel safe, they don't actually have to give an
47:55
adult a hug if they're adult. Simple things like that, you know,
48:00
And that's just that's just one simplistic example obviously, but there's things like that.
48:06
You know, it's not these disingenuous examples that that might be given about,
48:10
like oh, you know, teaching lgbtq I theory to children and no
48:15
one has suggested that since things like that and equating grooming and and such things
48:23
like that, like, that's not what we're talking about at all. You
48:27
know, we're talking about tailored, specific, nuanced education for age appropriate groups
48:35
and also teaching or giving education resources to, like I said, groups like
48:42
like police who only have in Australia. I don't know what the timeframe is
48:49
for police in the US, but in Australia, you know, to become
48:52
a police officer you only have to do six months worth of training. And
48:59
you know, to think that these are the people who are not only interviewing
49:02
children disclosing child sexual abuse, but also the perpetrators who cannounce smart. Often
49:09
if they're especially if they're a lot older and they're a practiced serial offender,
49:13
they're going to be able to outsmart a lot of people, especially if they're
49:15
new to the force and they don't have that forensic understanding of what these people
49:20
are like and how they can. You know, they'll feign they'll feign ignorance,
49:23
they'll feign remorse. You know, they'll do the sad old man act
49:28
or you know, it might not necessarily be a man, but you know
49:30
what I mean that they're practiced at psychological manipulation. It's akin to mind control,
49:36
I suppose, so those sorts of training programs as well. Wow,
49:42
I a Grease. There's a lot, obviously a lot to talk about.
49:45
I'd love to have you back at a later time. I mean, you
49:51
are I mean to say you're inspiring is an understatement, but I really want
49:57
to appreciate. I appreciate you coming on here and taking the time. But
50:00
my god, what's the best way for people to get in contact with you,
50:05
Grace? They can go to the foundation website Grace Team dot com dot
50:15
au. So that would be my personal website with Grace Team Foundation dot org.
50:22
Yeah, okay, okay, we'll have we'll have both of those linked
50:27
up here at the Trauma Theas Podcast dot com. Again, I want to
50:30
thank you so much for taking the time. Love to have you back.
50:34
You're doing it. Yeah, you see awesome. Thank you so much,
50:38
Thank you so much for having me