Facts, not hysteria and hearsay

The Austrlaian
July 27, 2015

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/facts-not-hysteria-and-hearsay/story-e6frg71x-1227457790004

Victims of child sexual abuse have fought a long, painful battle for justice. Their cause, sadly, has been set back by the incompetence of, and shameful distortions by, Victoria Police. As John Ferguson revealed on Saturday’s front page, the police force vastly overstated the number of suicides related to child sex abuse by Catholic clergy in the state. After claiming 43 church-related suicides had taken place, police now concede the real figure was one suicide in which church-related sex abuse was a contributing factor.

The disclosure, in a Crime Department intelligence brief, is a blow to the credibility of Victoria Police’s Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton. He gave evidence to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into abuse, based on a senior detective’s “list’’ of suicide victims who had supposedly been abused by clerics. That assertion — disseminated in much of the media and elsewhere as gospel — was a key reason for holding the inquiry and, in turn, the national sex abuse royal commission.

The other main reason Julia Gillard called the royal commission in 2013 was the accusations made on ABC television and in the Newcastle Herald by detective chief inspector Peter Fox about abuse in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese. The NSW special commission into those allegations led by Margaret Cunneen SC, however, found Fox an “unsatisfactory witness” who had lied to fellow police and whose evidence “should be approached with caution’’.