AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
Child sex abuse: Criminally liable institutions could be ordered to pay compensation
July 17, 2015
Jane Lee
Legal affairs, industrial relations and science correspondent
Courts could order institutions held criminally responsible for child sexual abuse to compensate victims, a report says.
The report, published on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse’s website on Friday, said organisations should be held criminally liable for abuse perpetrated by people linked to them, because targeting only offenders did not offer victims complete justice.
The criminal justice system focused only on individual offenders, with sentences varying in different states and territories, it said. This failed to recognise organisations’ contribution to the problem.
The report also criticised the “swathes of laws to extend the custody of sex offenders and restrict their activities and movements” such as detention orders and extended supervision, saying they were aimed more at quelling public fears than at reducing crime.
“An organisation should be held criminally responsible for the creation, management and response to risk when it has materialised in harm to a child,” the report’s co-authors, criminologists Professor Arie Freiberg, Karen Gelb and Hugh Donnelly, said.
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