Victoria Police turned blind eye to sexual assault by priests

By Peter Hoysted
Australian
October 31, 2016

https://goo.gl/qBNqUq

Victim of clerical child sexual abuse Peter Blenkiron. Photo by Stuart McEvoy

Peter Blenkiron is a victim of clerical child sexual abuse. An erudite and articulate man, he ­remains convinced his future lies in Ballarat but worries the challenges for the city and its 100,000 strong population may prove ­insurmountable.

“For the last 20 years, all we’ve been doing is mopping up the blood,” Blenkiron says. “Twenty years from now are we going to still be doing the same thing?”

The Catholic Diocese of Balla­rat extends across 58,000 square kilometres of western Victoria, from Portland in the southwest of the state to the Murray River towns of Swan Hill and Mildura in the north. Travelling from town to town for The Australian’s podcast “Ballarat’s Children”, it slowly dawned on me that there is not a single city, town, village or tiny hamlet that is not in some way stained by clerical child sex abuse.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse case studies across Australia have uncovered appalling tales of abuse wherever children have congregated; religious and social groups and sporting ­associations. Even the country’s most prestigious schools have ­failed children. But there is ­nowhere quite like the Ballarat Diocese, where pedophile rings were active for decades and some of the worst sex offenders this country has ever seen preyed on children without hindrance.

While recording “Ballarat’s Children”, I sat down over cups of coffee with victims who were ­nervous and agitated. They wanted their stories told but the narrative comes at considerable per­sonal cost.

After the end of his two-hour ­interview for the podcast, Blenk­iron told me he would spend that night in tears.

Victims’ accounts make for difficult listening. What is extra­ordinary is that after some have drawn the courage to come forward and tell them, often they have not been believed by the most important people in their lives: parents, brothers and sisters, close friends. Now siblings no longer speak, fathers have turned against sons, friendships have been ­abruptly terminated and families have been torn apart.

There have been suicides, lives ended in recklessness, other lives spent in a fog of alcohol or drug abuse.

Those who have come forward and spoken to the royal commission wonder out loud if raking over their painful memories has been worth the effort.

One victim told me he regretted giving evidence. He had ­received a moment’s solace in the witness box but when he returned home, he was shunned. Pondering the alternative, he told me: “I’d still be a mess but at least I’d have my family.”

The lingering trauma of clerical child sex abuse within the Ballarat Diocese is so abhorrent, so awful, so unremittingly bleak. Yet it is a part of Australia’s social history. The lid has been lifted. It cannot be replaced. Nor should it. If we don’t understand the mistakes of the past then we run the grave risk of repeating them.

What we have learned from the royal commission’s hearings is that those in charge of institutions — religious or secular, government or non-government — ­invariably respond almost instinctively to protect the reputation of the institution first, with the rights of victims pushed a long way back second.

In this respect the Catholic Church was no different.

The principal reasons for the outrageous levels of child sex ­offending within the Ballarat ­Diocese are attributable to policing failures.

In 1972, in what has become known as the Mildura Conspiracy, a pedophile priest, Monsignor John Day, was allowed to evade justice while the detective investigating him, Denis Ryan, was forced out by senior members of the Victoria Police Force.

The architect of the conspiracy was the then chief commissioner of Victoria Police, Reginald Jackson. His aim was to protect the reputation of the force and shield it from scandal. Day’s victims were ignored. Ryan was sent packing.

We have almost become inured to tales of police corruption in Australia. Police are corrupted by the huge amount of black money that flows from criminal enterprises. Corrupt police engage in drug running, extortion rackets and criminals sometimes disappear. It is what I would describe as typical or orthodox corruption and in a sense it is inevitable.

The Mildura Conspiracy speaks of something quite different. The indefatigable detective Ryan challenged a group within the Victoria Police Force who, through a perverse sense of loyalty, took it upon themselves to spare the Catholic Church any embarrassment in the courts.

As a young uniformed officer, Ryan was told by a more senior colleague: “A priest would not be charged with any offence in Victoria short of murder.”

After he became a detective, Ryan was asked to join a shadowy group of detectives known in the police vernacular as “The Catholic Mafia”. The group’s sole objective was to keep priests out of harm’s way in the courts. Perhaps naively, Ryan thought this amounted to traffic and public order offences but he declined the invitation.

By 1972 in Mildura, the same policemen who had approached Ryan were now senior officers — one a head of the Homicide squad, another would go on to ­become head of the CIB. Ryan’s principal tormentor was John O’Connor, a superintendent and the chief ­commissioner’s special investigator. After the Mildura Conspiracy, O’Connor became an assistant commissioner and retired at that rank.

The consequences of the conspiracy endure to this day. Two generations of children were ­betrayed. It would be difficult to imagine a more serious breach of public trust.

The Ballarat Diocese led by Bishop Ronald Mulkearns understood the police would not charge his offending priests and the ­expectation was that he move priests on whenever complaints grew too loud to new parishes, new communities and new groups of unsuspecting children.

Priests like Day, Gerald Ridsdale, Robert Claffey and Paul David Ryan could prey on children with impunity. These men were criminals who watched Monsignor Day walk away and learned there would be no consequences for their evil conduct.

Unsurprisingly, the rate of ­offending escalated after 1972. ­Despite the proliferation of ­attacks on children, only one priest was convicted in Victoria for child sex offences in the two decades that followed. Michael Glennon, a priest from Preston in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, was convicted of raping a 10-year-old girl and sentenced to two years in prison in 1978. He served seven months.

He was charged again in 1984 with raping five boys and one girl, aged between 10 and 16. The trial was delayed for several years after journalist, now senator, Derryn Hinch broadcast details of Glennon’s first conviction. After losing a High Court appeal, Glennon was convicted for a second time in 1991 and was sent to prison for seven years.

Glennon was the first Roman Catholic cleric to be convicted of child sex offending in Victorian criminal history. He was regarded by the church as a maverick, a one off. Glennon was quickly laicised.

Gerald Ridsdale’s first conviction in 1993 became the real watershed moment. In its wake the Catholic Church was bombarded with writs from victims. The floodgates had opened leading to a meeting between the then archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, and the then premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett, where Kennett is said to have told Pell: “If you don’t fix this, I will.”

Ridsdale had been an active pedophile since the early 1960s. Many years later, he confessed to his sister that his victims numbered in the hundreds. By the time Ridsdale came to the attention of Victoria Police, it simply had no idea of the scale of the rampant ­offending across the diocese.

Police investigating clerical pedophilia found themselves under-resourced and lacking in support. Overall there was no sense of urgency from police at senior levels, no attempt to understand the wave of criminality they were encountering.

Twenty years after the Mildura Conspiracy, police simply had no idea of what they were dealing with, but there is no excuse for ­investigative torpor. The rape of a child was a capital crime in Vic­toria until 1954. Perpetrators could hang for it. There can be no dis­puting the seriousness of the ­offending and those who failed to bring offenders to account ­cannot now claim they did not understand the enduring consequences for victims.

More than 20 years later, Victoria Police boasts a raft of convictions. Just last month Father Robert Claffey, 73, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for sexually ­assaulting 12 children between the ages of six and 16 between 1970 and 1992.

One of Claffey’s victims waited almost half a century for justice. Other victims who did come forward and reported their abuse were denied their moment of retribution, used as fodder in the bargaining between defence and prosecutor that led to Claffey’s guilty plea.

We are left to wonder what might have been had Monsignor John Day faced the courts as he should have in 1972. Would those active pedophile priests and clerics that came after Day be deterred and refrain from preying on so many children, so openly, so brazenly? We’ll never know but we can guess that many victims in Ballarat would not be victims had Day been charged.

This gives little solace to victims in the aftermath of the ­conspiracy.

When I’ve spoken with them, they offer a range of solutions. Many want justice. Others insist on fair and reasonable compensation. Some speak of whole of community responses to draw disenfranchised and disconnected people back together. So many more will never come forward to make a complaint and continue to suffer in silence.

All of them have been cast aside by powerful people who discarded them as collateral damage.

The challenge for communities, for government, for police and for the church is to ensure that 20 years from now, we are not still mopping up the blood in Ballarat.