AUSTRALIA
Sky News
Making institutions criminally liable for failing to report child sexual abuse is likely to encourage reporting, the head of the child abuse royal commission says.
The royal commission is considering whether other states and territories should follow the lead of NSW and Victoria in having an offence relating to failure to report.
The issue of abuse being known to a responsible person in an institution but not reported to the authorities has been raised in number of its public hearings.
The criminal law does not generally impose a positive duty requiring a person to act, commission chair Justice Peter McClellan says.
‘Failure to report abuse to the authorities may leave a child, or perhaps a number of children, exposed to abuse,’ he said in a speech to be screened at a National Council of Churches conference in Melbourne on Tuesday.
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