AUSTRALIA
SBS
Source AAP
Churches, the Salvation Army and authorities have known for 40 years about the abuse coming to light at a royal commission, a prominent Sydney reverend says.
“They all knew,” Wayside Chapel’s Reverend Bill Crews told AAP. “There’s no institution or organisation, whether it’s the church or the government or NGOs, who can claim they didn’t know.”
But they were more concerned about “protecting the good name of the institution” than the abused children.
Between 1971 and 1983, Rev Crews ran a crisis centre in Kings Cross, where many street kids came for help.
That’s where he first met Mary Hooker.
She was raped and beaten as a 13-year-old girl while living at a state-run home in 1972, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard on Thursday.
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