AUSTRALIA
The Sydney Morning Herald
November 26, 2017
By Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie
When Merrin Wake first met a legally-trained senior Salvation Army leader and the church’s lawyer to report her alleged childhood sexual abuse by five men within the church, she went away feeling like she had not been believed.
Months later, after several more meetings in the Collins Street office of the Salvation Army’s law firm, Ms Wake settled her case with a substantial out-of-court payment.
But the deed of release prepared by the Salvation Army’s law firm made it clear the church was making no admissions by settling.
For Ms Wake, there would be no official acknowledgement of whether the Salvation Army accepted her allegations that from the age of three until her early teens she encountered abuse ranging from inappropriate touching to rape.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.