Child sex abuse: How the royal commission plans to protect kids

By Danny Tran
ABC News
August 14, 2017

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-14/how-the-royal-commission-will-keep-your-child-safe/8804780

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has released its criminal justice report.

The royal commission has made sweeping legal and policy recommendations.

Fairness and reform - that's what the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse says are its goals in releasing dozens of recommendations on the criminal justice system.

The royal commission has made a total of 85 recommendations, including major legal and policy changes which it hopes will be adopted across the nation to stamp out child abuse and prosecute more offenders.

But what are the most important changes being proposed, and how will they change the way Australia responds to child sex abuse?

Most child abuse laws in Australia are aimed at perpetrators but this particular law will be aimed at other people, including the owners and managers of places that have children in their care.

The royal commission is recommending that state and territory governments make it a crime not to go to the police about child abuse.

But it goes further, arguing that reasonable people who "suspect, or should have suspected" that a child is being molested would be committing a crime if they did not go to the police.

The commission said the law was necessary, "particularly in light of the evidence we have heard from a number of senior representatives of institutions effectively denying that they had any knowledge or had formed any belief or suspicion of abuse being committed in circumstances".

"Their denials are very difficult to accept," it said.

In some parts of Australia, religious confessions are privileged so members of the clergy can refuse to reveal anything they learn.

But the royal commission is recommending any exemption on the confessional is removed, meaning members of the clergy would break the law if they failed to report child abuse to the authorities.

"There should be no excuse, protection nor privilege in relation to religious confessions," the report said.

"We heard evidence of a number of instances where disclosures of child sexual abuse were made in religious confession, by both victims and perpetrators.

"We heard evidence that perpetrators who confessed to sexually abusing children went on to reoffend and seek forgiveness again."

The goal of this recommendation is to prevent child sex abuse as opposed to bringing it to the attention of police.

It targets adults who have the power or the responsibility to stop a child from being abused, but fail to do so.

The law is aimed at people who know there is a substantial risk that someone associated with their organisation will sexually abuse a child, but do not do anything about it.

It wouldn't apply to foster or kinship carers.

If a child sex abuse case gets to court it can sometimes be only a victim's word against an offender's, which makes it hard for juries to be satisfied about something beyond reasonable doubt.

The royal commission is proposing that laws are changed so evidence of other allegations may be admissible, including tendency evidence and coincidence evidence.

Tendency evidence refers to when juries believe an offender has a tendency to act in a particular way because they've already been convicted of an allegation.

In the same vein, coincidence evidence refers to when juries think it's unlikely an allegation isn't a coincidence because someone's received similar allegations in the past.

"Courts have assumed for many years that tendency and coincidence evidence is likely to be highly prejudicial - that is, very unfair - to the accused," the report said.

"A number of considerations have led us to conclude that these assumptions are wrong."

The royal commission found that in many parts of the country, people convicted of child sex offences were sentenced in the context of when they offended.

That meant that Australian courts were applying historical standards to jail time and non-parole periods.

The commission wants news laws so that offenders are punished in accordance with current sentencing standards.

"We are satisfied that historical sentencing standards were in error, based on misunderstandings of the impact of child sexual abuse on victims," the report said.

"The sentence must be limited to the maximum sentence available for the offence at the date when the offence was committed."