AUSTRALIA
The Australian
BY EOIN BLACKWELL AAP MAY 05, 2014
THE Christian Brothers regarded the physical and sexual abuse of children as abhorrent and a moral failing but not a criminal offence, a royal commission has been told.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has also heard double jeopardy laws prevented other men from coming forward to tell of their abuse at the hands of a Brother Dick, who was sentenced to three and a half years after confessing to abusing five “unknown” children.
Allegations of child sex abuse were not passed on to police because the order did not see them as a criminal matter.
“All I can assume, understand, is that there was a mindset that didn’t see this first and foremost as a crime; that it was something of a moral failing, contributing to the corruption of the child,” Brother Anthony Shanahan, the order’s former provincial leader for WA and SA, said on Monday.
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