AUSTRALIA
Sky News
A Christian organisation that ran a Northern Territory home where numerous Aboriginal children were sexually abused says it can’t afford to compensate its victims because that would mean curtailing its missionary work.
Darwin’s Retta Dixon home was run by the Aborigines Inland Mission – now the Australian Indigenous Ministries, or AIM – from 1946 until 1980 when abuses were perpetrated by staff against resident mixed-race Aboriginal children who had been taken from their families.
AIM general director Reverend Trevor Leggott, who’s headed the organisation since 1996, and says he didn’t know of the abuse claims – some of which date back more than 60 years – before last week.
He made a formal apology to victims a day before his appearance on Tuesday at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse sitting in Darwin.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.