AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
October 16, 2014
Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter
The Pentecostal movement needs a child sexual abuse telephone hotline because it’s too hard for church leaders to report crimes to the state executive body, a royal commission has heard.
Retired senior pastor Chris Peterson told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse that reporting abuse to the movement’s umbrella body, Australian Christian Churches, was “too difficult a course”.
He said the senior pastors of the 1000 Australian churches affiliated with the movement needed an easier way to report abuse.
“We [should] create some sort of hotline or facility where a senior pastor has an immediate connection on matters of such importance,” he said.
Mr Peterson was the senior pastor at a Queensland church where a teenage boy had been sexually molested by a youth pastor.
The church had a child abuse policy, written by two volunteers with no child protection background, that implied abusers should try to avoid detection and said Satan was to blame for accusations, the commission heard.
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