The two words that say so much about this culture of abuse and shame.

The words chosen by a once-great man at the Royal Commission yesterday told us everything about a heinous culture of abuse.

Yesterday, a once-powerful man sat before a Royal Commission and apologised.

He apologised for the fact that for 30 years, he presided over a school where children were routinely sexually abused by his staff.

He apologised for not acting to protect these children, for not reporting their complaints to the police, for not firing the teachers responsible and for, in one instance, giving a glowing reference for future jobs.

It was hard to watch Ian Paterson, the well-respected former headmaster at Knox Grammar, one of Sydney’s most elite schools for boys say:

 “An apology seems totally inadequate but I do so with an awful feeling of uselessness in my heart…I accept decisions I made were wrong and I failed to recognise, and hence respond sufficiently to, events we now know were indicators of a sinister and much bigger picture, a picture of serious sexual abuse which would damage the lives of so many.”

But the words that most revealed the culture of secrecy, acceptance and shame, of victim-blaming and dismissal that allowed paedophiles to thrive at establishments like Knox, and countless other schools, churches, orphanages and other institutions that are being examined in the Royal Commision into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse were to come.

When Ian Paterson was asked why, when a 15-year-old boy complained to him about being touched inappropriately and asked to engage in mutual masturbation with a male teacher, Paterson told him to go to the library and “think about what you’re alleging.”

“The boy was a drama boy. He was known as rather dramatical boy who could build up situations … I asked him to think about what I said,” Paterson told the inquiry yesterday.

A drama boy.

Those words say so much; they say so much about a culture where an adult would always be believed above a child. Where a child’s personalty, their ‘creative’ leanings, the scale of their imagination, their preference for the arts over science, pretty much ANYTHING about them could act as any kind of excuse or provocation for the abuse rained on them.

Paterson also conceded that, when a man in a balaclava assaulted a boy in a boarders’ dorm, “To contact the police I dont think entered one of our heads … ”

And also that when it came to the groping incident, he was “not aware it was a crime”.

Hearing these words in 2015, it seems absolutely unimaginable that such a man was not aware of the impact of the crimes being carried out around him.

Which is the only positive thing to come out of Mr Paterson’s testimony at the Commission.

He appeared like a creature from another age, one when protecting children was the least prominent thing in a headmaster’s mind.

It’s an attitude, a state of being, that seems impossible now.

Let’s all hope, for the sake of ‘Drama’ boys girls everywhere, that we are right about that.

Please post a message of support for the victims of the Knox abuse scandal, below.