Abuse focus on NSW Anglican diocese

AUSTRALIA
7 News

Annette Blackwell – AAP on August 2, 2016

The first of two major inquiries into child sex abuse by clergy and workers from Australia’s main Christian churches starts in Newcastle, NSW on Tuesday.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will spend two weeks investigating what senior Anglican clergy did to stop priest Peter Rushton and a pedophile network of clergy and church workers who operated in the Diocese of Newcastle for decades.

Rushton died in 2007 without ever being convicted.

There were believed to be up to 30 child sex abusers in the network, among them James Michael Brown who was jailed in 2012 for multiple offences against 20 boys while he was a youth worker.

Brown and Rushton were board members of the Anglican Church’s St Alban’s Boys Home at Aberdare, Cessnock.

In 2010 the Anglican Church named Rushton as a pedophile who organised boys to be abused by others.

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