AUSTRALIA
The Austrlaian

JULY 27, 2015

Victims of child sexual abuse have fought a long, painful battle for justice. Their cause, sadly, has been set back by the incompetence of, and shameful distortions by, Victoria Police. As John Ferguson revealed on Saturday’s front page, the police force vastly overstated the number of suicides related to child sex abuse by Catholic clergy in the state. After claiming 43 church-related suicides had taken place, police now concede the real figure was one suicide in which church-related sex abuse was a contributing factor.

The disclosure, in a Crime Department intelligence brief, is a blow to the credibility of Victoria Police’s Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton. He gave evidence to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into abuse, based on a senior detective’s “list’’ of suicide victims who had supposedly been abused by clerics. That assertion — disseminated in much of the media and elsewhere as…