AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Nicole Chettle
A man abused by a Sunshine Coast youth pastor as a child is still extremely angry at the church’s handling of his complaint more than five years after his abuser was jailed, an inquiry has heard.
Perpetrator Jonathan Baldwin befriended his victim, referred to in the commission as ALA, at a Queensland church that cannot be named for legal reasons in 2004.
The abuse allegedly occurred over a two-year period beginning when ALA was 13, the Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard.
The inquiry heard the boy’s family was baffled by the “deafening silence” of the church when in 2009 Baldwin was jailed for eight years, with a non-parole period of four years, on charges including “maintaining”, the indecent treatment of a child under 16 and sodomy.
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