AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
November 14, 2012
Gerard Henderson
Executive director, The Sydney Institute
The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s, decision to establish a royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has received overwhelmingly public support. We know, on the available evidence, that the wide-ranging and expensive inquiry will focus on past crimes and whether people in authority, in Gillard’s terminology, ”averted their eyes” with respect to abusers.
We also know, on the available evidence, that indigenous children in some Aboriginal communities are being sexually assaulted in 2012. Despite the efforts of Commonwealth, state and territory authorities, these crimes continue. Moreover, regrettably, there is scant public outrage about this contemporary abuse.
Sections of the media have focused on the Catholic Church’s deplorable inability in the past century to stop the crimes of some priests and some brothers with respect to primarily male children.
However, as the Jesuit priest Frank Brennan said on Lateline, the Catholic Church reformed its handling of sex abuse allegations in 1996. Soon after Pell became Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, he set up the Melbourne Response, which was aimed at confronting abuse of children by clerics and assisting victims.
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