AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
October 25, 2013
Patrick Parkinson
There ought to be little doubt that as a society, our record of dealing with child sexual abuse is one of shocking moral failure. It is a reasonable estimate to say that one in four Australian girls and one in 10 boys growing up in the 1970s and ’80s experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16. These are truly shocking figures.
Some of that abuse has occurred in church contexts. By far the most of these cases have been in the Catholic Church. Figures produced by the Victorian police of cases since 1950 indicated there were 10 times as many cases in the Catholic Church as in the Anglican Church, which was the next largest group. If that history were not bad enough, the cover-up of those crimes has been a scandal.
In the court of public opinion, the judgment has already been delivered. It is only the consequences of that judgment which are still being worked out in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Yet there is still a need to understand why these failures occurred. The reality is that no church or other community organisation is free from reproach. In Australia, there have been three inquiries established by the Anglican Church into its past failings in dealing appropriately with child sexual abuse cases. Much has changed since the mid-1990s, and child protection is typically taken very seriously in churches. Nonetheless, there is no room for complacency in any community organisation.
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