AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
November 12, 2012
Chris Goddard
Across the globe, the organised crimes of serial child rapists have been met with disorganisation by careless institutions.
THE stories from around the world are eerily similar. Children raped by perpetrators who are then sheltered by the organisations that gave them access to their victims. The names of the organisations are almost interchangeable.
In the US, one of the coaches of Penn State University football team has been found guilty of more than 40 counts of sexual assault against 10 boys over 15 years. Jerry Sandusky used his influence as a coach, and his own charity, to choose his victims.
Then, just weeks ago, the so-called ”perversion files” from the Boy Scouts of America went online. The Los Angeles Times is establishing a database of thousands of perpetrators over nearly a century, expelled from the scouts because of actual or suspected child sexual assault.
In Britain, two more inquiries have been ordered into the organised abuse of children in children’s homes in North Wales. The first will review the original inquiry by Sir Ronald Waterhouse in the 1990s. It is alleged that Waterhouse ignored allegations about at least one senior political figure. The other inquiry will investigate police responses, or lack thereof, to the crimes reported.
Then there is Jimmy Savile, the late BBC entertainer. Scotland Yard is pursuing more than 300 lines of inquiry into sexual assaults. Savile, it is alleged, used his position as a ”charitable” celebrity to gain access to victims in hospitals, schools and children’s homes. The BBC itself is under scrutiny, with its director-general George Entwistle quitting his post at the weekend.
Here in Victoria, the parliamentary committee of inquiry into child abuse in religious and other non-government organisations is sitting, an inquiry savaged as ”secretive” and ”shallow” by The Age’s religion editor, Barney Zwartz, on this page last Wednesday.
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