The Royal Commission's Dodgy Sex Abuse Stats

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
February 9, 2017

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/the-royal-commissions-dodgy-sex-abuse-stats/news-story/2ef6c92844cb268a4f68e111ede17c3d

There is no doubt Catholic priests abused hundreds of Australian children. There is no doubt church leaders scandalously covered it up.

But Geoffrey Luck shows there is also little doubt that the counsel assisting the commission has exaggerated the extent of abuse with figures she released last week.

The Church had been required to undertake a comprehensive data survey. First, it had to provide the total number of priests, brothers and sisters in all its authorities from 1950 to 2010. This number was not produced. Then it was asked for the total number of people who had alleged incidents of abuse. This is where the much-quoted number 4444 came from...

Third, the survey identified 1,880 “alleged perpetrators”, including 500 who were unknown (presumably not named). This resulted in an inability to be confident that there was not at least some double-counting.

Analysis of this raw data produced the overall figures for alleged abuse by priests and religious brothers and sisters, as well as the break-down by diocese and society. The figure for priests was 7%, which, if correct, indicates that 93% of all Catholic priests were and are innocent of child abuse...

The ABC dramatically displayed in a graphic the abuse proportions for various orders – 20.4% for Marist Brothers, 22% for Christian Brothers, 40.4% for St John of God Brothers.

Can anyone really believe these figures? They were obtained by dividing the number of “alleged perpetrators” in each category – distributed from the 1,880 total – by the total number of brothers in the order...

The real problem here is that the Royal Commission and its Council Assisting are happy to ply the public with raw numbers on different bases, unchecked, untested and unverified. After four years, and in the case of the Catholic Church untold hours of evidence in pursuit of prelates, it has not authenticated the vast bulk of claims or proven “alleged perpetrators” guilty or innocent. My impression is that it doesn’t want to spoil the impact of its numbers.

Despite 4444 complaints about 1880 “alleged perpetrators” the Royal Commission has heard evidence from only 261 witnesses in Catholic case studies...

If 40.4% of all St John of God Brothers were supposedly abusing the disabled children they were caring for at the Kendall Grange boys’ home in Morisset, south of Newcastle, why was there not a case study into that institution? It must have been the highest concentration of paedophiles in Australia, perhaps the world. That failure means we don’t know the truth or the reasons.

Well, the reason that Catholic order wasn’t investigated is that that flagship 40.4% figure was a fraud. When I got hold of the Church’s basic data in documents tabled in the Commission but not available publicly until yesterday, I found the figures were sixty years old. They related to the first incidents reported in the 1950s.

In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s the figure varied from six percent to nine percent; for the 1990s and 2000s it was zero. What’s surprising is why the Catholic Church allowed its data to be misrepresented in this damaging fashion.

Luck also rightly questions the propensity to treat allegations as fact:

How many of the 4444 complaints against Catholic religious were in fact valid? Is it impossible that at least some were not made in expectation of compensation? Even less is known of the many thousands of private interviews with Commission members, who are not required to test the truth of complaints. In the case of Catholic institutions, 2400 individuals claimed abuse in private sessions.

The possibility that the incidence of abuse has been over-stated by the Royal Commission’s decision to take a non-critical approach to claims is a serious charge. It is made as a result of a personal experience, where the Commission declined to interest itself in a likely fraud. Where better for a conman to hide his false complaint than under the skirts of a sympathetic tribunal?

I wrote a twelve-page submission, the result of a ten-month investigation. It detailed the case against a convicted criminal who had attempted a serious insurance fraud, and had tried to extort money from a Catholic school, alleging sexual abuse half a century ago. The claim was false, relying on the mists of time to obscure the lies of his invented story. He had gone on to attempt the same conman’s trick on a second school, but had been challenged and repulsed.

The concern I raised with the Royal Commission was his belated complaints of abuse, including sodomy, at a third school, which circumstantially appeared to be opportunistic and fabricated. I asked for an investigation, and offered to give evidence. The reply was that the issue fell outside the Commission’s terms of reference. My submission was merely referred to Commission officers “for their consideration”.

It can be argued that my submission related to a merely anecdotal case. But, except where they may have been investigated in case-study hearings, all the many thousands of complaints are anecdotal.

Please don't mistake me. I know very well that hundreds of children were indeed abused, and I heard truly shocking evidence about some of those cases, particularly involving victims of Gerald Ridsdale.

But I also heard many allegations made that were clearly false, and which have since been accepted as false even by the counsel assisting the royal commission.

I am not suggesting for a second that those false allegations were made by people hoping to get money. Not at all. They were made by people who honestly misremembered for various complex reasons, or even honestly misunderstood. Here are four such examples, all involving Cardinal George Pell, a target of many false claims:

Last week the royal commission, which grilled Pell for many hours, surprisingly decided to publish the final submissions of its counsel assisting, Gail Furness...

Furness concedes many of the most repeated allegations against Pell don’t stand up.

Remember one victim, David Ridsdale, claiming Pell tried to bribe him to stop him telling police he’d been abused by his uncle, notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale?

David Ridsdale testified Pell had asked him in 1993 “what would it take” to keep quiet. “I remember saying to both my sisters, ‘the bastard just tried to bribe me’.”...

I don’t doubt he believed it. Nor does Furness, but her submission, co-authored by Stephen Free, says the evidence does not back him up. Yes, Pell offered to help the distraught family friend.

But “given Mr Ridsdale … expressed a desire to Bishop Pell for a private process, it is not likely that Bishop Pell would then have thought it necessary to offer Mr Ridsdale an inducement to prevent him from going to the police”...

Furness also casts doubt on other allegations promoted by journalists.

For instance, one witness said he’d gone to Pell’s presbytery in Ballarat one weekday to warn about a paedophile priest, but Pell had chased him away. (Almost no journalist revealed this witness was himself later jailed for abusing children.)

Furness concludes this claim “cannot be resolved”, since Pell was not living at that presbytery and at that time of day was probably at work. She also casts doubt on a third claim, which made headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald and on the ABC.

One witness said he’d overheard Pell joke about Gerald Ridsdale with a fellow priest at a funeral mass in Ballarat, saying “Haha I think Gerry’s been rooting boys again”.

In fact, says Furness, there was no such mass on the date the witness gave and the priest Pell allegedly joked with was then living in Horsham and denied Pell would say such a thing anyway.

Furness does not even trouble to mention another false claim — that in 1969 Pell heard an abused boy plead for help but did nothing. Pell’s passport shows he actually lived in Rome that year. So what remains of the case against Pell?

I hope to soon publish other such cases of people making claims against Pell that are clearly based on false memories, perhaps because of the intense media criticism of him.

I also understand that the latest allegations against Pell - ones that seem dubious and even trivial - are so thin that police are no longer recommending prosecution, even if the brief has now gone for a second time to prosecutors after more than a year of investigation.

And I make two more points again in response to the media campaign to make Pell a scapegoat and turn the church into a smoking ruin.

Where were the police in all this? We are told about 4444 complaints to the church, but why did police not act? What of complaints to them which were ignored or not fully investigated? I mention this not to excuse the church or its evil cover-ups but to point out that there was a wider culture of denial and silence that went far beyond the church.

The average gap between alleged offence and the alleged victim lodging a complaint was 33 years, according to the royal commission. And those complaints are now themselves several years old. This suggests that the church did decades ago clean up its act and crack down on pedophiles. In fact, I understand that the Sydney diocese (reformed by Pell, among others) has not received a single complaint of abuse by a priest involving contact over the past 21 years. Attempts by the media to paint the church as unreformed and a pedophile haven are completely false.