Catholics Revise Figures on Victim

By Barney Zwartz
The Age
June 8, 2013

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/catholics-revise-figures-on-victims-20130607-2nvm6.html

The Catholic Church has revised its figures on clergy sexual abuse victims in Victoria, now saying it has identified 849 victims and 269 offenders.

The church submitted the new figures on Thursday afternoon to the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled clergy sexual abuse, replacing the statistics in its original submission, Facing the Truth. That cited 618 victims.

The offenders include 98 priests, 114 brothers, nine nuns and 42 laypeople of whom two are female. There are two seminarians and four are unknown.

Church spokesman Shane Mackinlay said the revised figures were the result of collating all five submissions to the inquiry by church ''entities'': the Melbourne and Ballarat dioceses, the Christian Brothers, and the Salesian and St John of God orders.

There were also submissions from the two church abuse protocols, Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response (by its independent commissioner), but these were not entities, Father Mackinlay said.

Of the victims, 304 were accepted by the Melbourne Response and 307 from Towards Healing - a drop of seven from the original submission - and there were 238 others. These comprised people who settled outside the protocols through the legal system, those from orphanages and institutions where the government was also involved, and the 31 who settled with the St John of God order via a class action. The oldest abuse cases dated from the 1930s, and the figures were complete to June 30, 2012, Father Mackinlay said.

He still could not guarantee that the figures were comprehensive - for example, they did not include settlements outside Towards Healing by other religious orders - ''but we're getting very close''.

He said the original figure of 618 cases was based only on records from the two abuse protocols, the only ones that held centralised records, but more detailed research was done as the church groups prepared to give evidence.