AUSTRALIA
The National
Australian inquiry into child sex abuse ‘should have focused on Catholic Church’, former priest says
Kathy Marks
Nov 21, 2012
SYDNEY // Stephen Woods was 11 when he was first abused by a teacher at his Roman Catholic primary school in Ballarat, Victoria. Robert Best, from the Christian Brothers religious order, would take him to his office and molest him, “while all the time telling me that I was bad and it was my fault”.
Another Christian Brother, Edward Dowlan, abused him at a boys’ boarding school and when Mr Woods, troubled and confused, later sought advice from the Catholic Church, he was introduced to Gerald Risdale, who raped him in a public toilet by Lake Wendouree, in Ballarat. He was 14.
All three men, who had multiple victims, were eventually jailed by the Australian authorities, but Mr Woods, now 51, remains furious at the way the Church concealed their actions. Risdale was moved from parish to parish, and Victoria police later concluded that the bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, had known about his behaviour as far back as the 1970s. Despite that, Risdale was allowed to continue in the ministry until his arrest in 1993.
It is this type of systemic failing that a royal commission, announced last week by Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister, is to address. It will focus not only on the Roman Catholic Church – which, as in other countries such as Ireland and Germany, has been plagued by child-abuse scandals – but on other religious and state institutions, such as schools, orphanages and Scout groups.
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