Salvation Army’s quick action on child abuse sets the standard

By Alan Howe
Herald Sun
February 16, 2014

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/salvation-armys-quick-action-on-child-abuse-sets-the-standard/story-fni0ffut-1226828653961

Salvation Army commissioner James Condon cried while accepting responsibility for the attacks and unreservedly apologised to the victims. Source: News Limited

Falling out with the Methodists, he moved to London where he was struck by the wretchedness of life for so many after the Industrial Revolution. While industrialists had made fortunes, millions were without hope, without work, undernourished and living in disease-infested slums.

A practical man, Booth imagined a Christian response to this squalor. He’d keep preaching the word of his God, but he and his army of volunteers would feed the poor, help find them work and house pregnant, unmarried women who in those days — and until recently — were scorned by their communities and churches.

By the 1880s, his Salvation Army was finding missing people to reunite families, rehabilitating prisoners, detoxing alcoholics and accommodating the homeless.

Booth brought dignity to shunned people who lives had slipped from their control and for whom no one else — much less the organised religions — cared.

His army soon stretched across the globe. These days, its foot soldiers are carrying out that same mission and are often first to help at catastrophes such as the Boxing Day tsunami and Cyclone Tracey.

Last week, the Salvos provided meals to CFA crews across Victoria along with bedding and other necessities for those who’d lost homes in the fires.

Few read the Salvos’ newspaper, War Cry, but most are still happy to buy if from their ageing army of paperboys and girls.

I doubt anyone knows its cover price either. They just hand over a couple of gold coins and wave it off, or respectfully fold it in half and leave it on the bar.

The Salvos have done such good work for so long that a survey carried out by Sweeny Research and advertising group, Gray Global, found them to be Australia’s most trusted brand.

That brand today is in tatters. Cunning paedophiles, knowing the Salvos’ children’s homes would provide a steady supply of vulnerable innocents, aimed at them. Several infestations of them coalesced into debauched tag teams of wicked men and, unusually, some women, to arrange forced, sometimes violent, sex with children in their “care”.

Evidence presented at the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about the conduct of some Salvos has been chilling. If it is to be believed — and the Salvos have been paying compensation, so someone does — then they have had officers who truly despised the children entrusted to them.

Evidence heard so far has boys — hungry, shoeless and regularly beaten — being raped by Salvation Army captains, before being sent to other adults’ homes to be further exploited.

One of the Salvation Army officers was Lawrence Wilson who is alleged to have seen the boys as a kind of currency to be used throughout the dark underworld of bisexual paedophilia.

The Salvos have paid out $1.2 million in compensation for his victims. So far.

Major Victor Bennett is said to have locked up in a cage for a week a boy who dared complain about the rapes.

In what can only be described as a child prostitution ring, boys living in one of the Salvos’ Brisbane homes were said to have been flown to Sydney for days at a time to be raped and molested by a “a millionaire” and a “top chef”.

In evidence, retired Salvation Army major Cliff Randall said the boys returned to Brisbane visibly subdued.

One boy “never came back”. It was suggested he “was at the bottom of Sydney Harbour”.

But the Salvation Army’s response to this has been clear and emphatic, notwithstanding the paedophile gangs that infiltrated it, possibly with the assistance of corrupt Queensland police covering their tracks.

The Salvos are calling it a collusion of failures rather than a conspiracy of cover-ups.

Their world leader, a horrified Andre Cox, wrote to the royal commission to say he was “disturbed to the very depths of his being” by what he was hearing from Australia and called for action to make sure it could never happen again.

Salvation Army commissioner James Condon cried while accepting responsibility for the attacks and unreservedly apologised to the victims.

And he’s acted by immediately suspending Major John McIver who, the commission was told, had abused and beaten children in his care, charges McIver denies.

That’s quite a contrast to Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart’s smirking response to a query about why his church had taken almost two decades to act on paedophile priest Father Des Gannon.

“Well, better late than never,” Hart said, defensively, perhaps even dismissively.