This is the season for surprises. Gifts under the Christmas tree you never expected, messages from friends you thought had given up on you, announcements from governments about what they plan for the year ahead or have put on hold because they don’t have the money/willpower/whatever…
I can’t say I really like surprises very much. I’m the kind of person who likes to plan ahead and this presumes knowing what all the variables are. Anyone who has ever worked with me or been subject to my comments on their project/programme design will know that I am absolutely unshakable about the importance of identifying possible risks, putting in place a management strategy for them and generally not allowing the unforeseen to compromise outcomes.
You will understand my frustration, then, at the seemingly endless reports in the daily newspapers in Australia that are filled with surprise/shock/horror about the latest scandal to come to light involving the very issues that this website covers: human trafficking, child sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence against women and children.
We have had a spate of nasty events in my homeland just recently. If you have been following my blogs, you will know that there have been numerous reports of what the newspapers are calling “clergy abuse” – the sexual abuse of children by priests and other men of religion. We have had a series of terrible attacks on women, most of them random acts of violence that have led to the most gruesome of deaths. Recently the newspapers carried reviews of a book outlining the sexual abuse of women and children by United Nations peacekeepers.
Each time one of these incidents occurs, the media express shock and surprise that something so terrible can happen. The public rise up in outrage, marching in the streets, calling for someone to do something so it never happens again.
What really surprises me, though, is that we are surprised at these events. The sexual abuse of children by priests and UN peacekeepers, attacks on women walking home late at night, the luring of women into high-risk situations over the Internet or with deception – I have been writing about these, in fine detail, for more than two decades. Many of my friends have been working in these areas too. None of this surprises us – but I am sure we are all surprised that after two decades nothing has changed.
Why have we not learned? I can understand that journalists writing today were probably still at school 20 years ago and that those who interviewed me in the 1990s have moved on. But why do today’s media professionals have no access to historical memory? To lessons learned in the past? To the fact that today’s events are not “new” news and that what is really the news is the fact that we have not been able to stop them.
I think, in fact, that one of the reasons we have not stopped these horrendous crimes is precisely because we have not learned past lessons and keep reinventing the wheel.
It’s frustrating in my line of work to visit projects, for example, and see them doing things that more than a decade ago we realised did not work. Lessons I wrote about then were learned for a short time and then forgotten. New staff moved in and no-one passed on the lessons.
My fear is that this will just go on happening again and again.
Thank goodness we now have the Internet and so many ways of electronically storing and sharing lessons, and in particular passing on the knowledge in the form of training and ideas exchange. I am convinced that this is a key to making sure that we build on lessons and begin to really make a difference. If you are reading this, you are already interested in doing that, so please spread the word about this website, get people to sign up to take a training course, and try to help make sure that, 20 years from now, people are not expressing surprise that children are being abused or women murdered.