AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 27, 2013
CONFIDENTIAL documents written by a senior employee of the Anglican Church earlier this year state others within the church may be at risk of criminal prosecution for failing to report allegations of child sex abuse to police.
In one letter, tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the professional standards director of the diocese of Grafton, Michael Elliott, said the allegations related to abuse committed in a children’s home in northern NSW.
The diocese spent years denying it was legally liable for this abuse, the commission has heard. In his letter written in February to the acting registrar of the diocese, Mr Elliott wrote: “By virtue of their complaints being so mishandled, the situation has resulted in the re-traumatising of these victims. Furthermore, non-reporting to authorities may have put individuals at risk of criminal prosecution.”
The commission has heard the church received allegations that about 12 people allegedly abused children at the North Coast Children’s Home in Lismore between the 1940s and 80s. The allegations against three of those, all Anglican priests, were reported to police in 2006, but the others were not passed on until Mr Elliott did so earlier this year. The commission has heard that another priest, Allan Kitchingman, had been found guilty of indecently assaulting a teenage boy in 1968, before being employed at the home, where he went on to abuse another teenager and was subsequently jailed.
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