AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By William Rollo and Marlina Whop
A retired bishop who dismissed child sex abuse claims made by former residents at a Rockhampton orphanage says he regrets not reading a book written by a victim.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which began hearings on Tuesday in the central Queensland city, was told that for more than three decades, children at St Joseph’s Neerkol Orphanage were raped, molested and beaten.
It heard victims describe abuse carried out by a groundsman and a group of priests.
The inquiry has heard the Sisters of Mercy who ran the orphanage not only overlooked the abuse but were complicit in it being carried out during a period stretching from the 1940s to the1970s.
One witness says she was raped when she was 14 by a worker at the orphanage in 1965, another was sexually abused by a priest and forced to drink her own urine to stay hydrated.
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