AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX
Crime reporterSydney
@DanBox10
A church-run telephone hotline for child abuse victims was answered by a senior cleric who was later defrocked for having group sex with a teenager, a royal commission has heard.
Graeme Lawrence, then the dean of Newcastle’s Anglican Cathedral in NSW, also failed to tell those calling the hotline that he had a close working relationship with at least one priest who was the subject of repeated allegations of abuse.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard Mr Lawrence was part of a powerful “Gang of Three” within the church, who protected another serial child abuser, the later Father Peter Rushton.
One victim, who cannot be named and who reported his abuse to Mr Lawrence on two occasions in the 1990s, said “it never occurred to me to ask ‘Are you a pedophile and who is your offsider?’
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