BishopAccountability.org

Putting a Royal Mess Right

The Economist
November 14, 2012

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/11/child-abuse-australia

AFTER mounting public pressure Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, announced on November 12th a sweeping public inquiry into what she called the “evil” of child sexual abuse. The inquiry will take the form of a royal commission, with wide investigative powers. Like its brief, its duration is open-ended. The hearings may take years, and promise to confront Australians with harrowing evidence.

Earlier this year, the state parliament in Victoria set up an inquiry into child abuse “by religious and other organisations”. The spark for Ms Gillard’s national inquiry was struck on November 8th by Peter Fox, a police detective chief-inspector in the neighbouring state of New South Wales. Mr Fox wrote an open letter to Barry O’Farrell, his state’s premier, and then gave an explosive television interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He accused the Catholic Church of covering up child sexual abuse, particularly in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, where he works. Mr Fox wrote:

I can testify from my own experience that the church covers up, silences victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests to protect the good name of the church. None of that stops at the Victorian border.

The culture of cover-up may not be confined to churches. Mr Fox says some in the police force have tried to smear him as mentally unstable since he came out as a whistleblower: “I knew when I decided to speak out that it was a one-way door, and there’s no going back.”

After a public outcry, Mr O’Farrell announced an inquiry into the Hunter Valley claims. But the outcry did not die down. Victims of child abuse, and parliamentarians across the political spectrum, demanded a more far-reaching response. In announcing a national inquiry swiftly, Ms Gillard has probably averted any political attack, and won plaudits even from some of her enemies.

Much media publicity over child sexual abuse in recent years has centred on allegations against the Catholic church; among observant Christians in Australia, about a quarter are Catholic and 17% Anglican. But the allegations have been broader. About three years ago, Kevin Rudd, then the prime minister, offered a formal apology to the so-called “lost innocents”: children shipped to Australia from Britain about 60 years ago, some of whom later suffered violence and sexual abuse in homes run by churches, governments and charities.

Ms Gillard has declared that the royal commission would not stop at the Catholic church. It will cover sexual abuse against children under the care of any church, state body, charity group and the police. It will be open to any victims to come forward to tell their stories. And it will focus on how those institutions responded to child abuse. Too many adults, she said, “have averted their eyes from this evil”.

Nonetheless, tensions with the Catholic church in particular surfaced quickly. Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, welcomed the royal commission, and pledged the church’s co-operation. He then complained of a “persistent press campaign” against his church: “It does not mean that we are largely the principal culprits.”

Australian governments have set up about 130 royal commissions over the past 110 years. Their subjects have included espionage, petroleum exploration around the Great Barrier Reef, deaths of aborigines in police custody, the conduct of British nuclear weapons tests in Australia in the 1950s—and even “human relationships” (the subject of a 1974 inquiry).

The commissions have wide legislative powers to gain access to information and to compel witnesses to give evidence. Depending on the scope of their terms of reference, the inquiries can also achieve enduring reforms, if only from the publicity they generate. Ms Gillard has yet to announce the royal commission’s terms of reference; its hearings are expected to start early next year. “Some people may want the maximum public airing of what happened to them,” she said. “That might be the biggest healing that they could have. For others, standing somewhere public and telling their story would be their version of hell.”




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