AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Melissa Davey
Thursday 23 March 2017
In February 2014, Greg Thompson returned to Newcastle in New South Wales to serve as bishop of the Anglican diocese, the same place he was abused almost four decades earlier as a teenager.
He had spent the previous seven years serving as bishop in the Northern Territory but thought it would be somewhat fitting to finish his working life in Newcastle, near where he grew up in the Upper Hunter and where he first became interested in the ministry.
He believed his experiences working with Indigenous people in Arnhem Land and victims of family violence and drug abuse would be useful to the Newcastle diocese, which he wanted to direct towards a stronger focus on social justice and community engagement.
That this was the place that he was sexually abused by friends of his family as a child, and by senior figures of the Newcastle Anglican church as a young adult, was something Thompson had disassociated himself from, as many abuse survivors do. He had never spoken of it except to his wife and children.
But, in May 2014, shortly into his tenure as bishop, Thompson received a summons to appear before the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. On the list of persons of interest was the name Ian Shevill. When Shevill was the bishop of Newcastle in 1975, he and another senior church figure sexually abused Thompson, who was then just 19.
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