Abuse Survivors Reject Vatican Claim about Australian Redress Scheme
The Guardian
Survivors of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy have reacted angrily to a Vatican claim at the UN that the Australian church's redress scheme is effective. In Geneva on Tuesday, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who heads a Vatican delegation appearing before the UN Committee against Torture, referred to the Australian Towards Healing process as an example of the church "responding positively" to victims of abuse, campaigner Nicky Davis said. Davis, who heads the Australian branch of Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said Tomasi was answering questions about the the Vatican's response to victims when he mentioned Towards Healing. "It was offered as an example of how the church is responding positively and seemed to imply that it would be a model scheme for other countries," said Davis, who attended the sessions. She said Australian survivors were astonished to hear the Vatican holding up the "disgraced" Towards Healing process as an example of the Catholic church properly addressing this issue. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is investigating the process and has held two public hearings into its effectiveness. "Towards Healing pretends to help survivors, but diverts them from reporting to police, keeps details of the church's callous endangering of children secret, protects dangerous predators from responsibility for their crimes and saves the church billions in redress," Davis said. "Towards Healing is an internal church program trying to appear independent, where the odds are heavily stacked against survivors receiving justice." Davis and other representatives of SNAP, which has more than 18,000 members in 79 countries, were in Geneva to meet the UN Committee on Torture. She told AAP that in her meetings she did not focus on Towards Healing because it had never before been raised by the Vatican, even during its presentation at a recent UN committee hearing on the protection of children. "I was surprised to hear it mentioned now." Davis said she would be sending the UN committee excerpts from evidence from the royal commission so it could be fully informed about Towards Healing. Tomasi has told the committee of experts in charge of the UN convention against torture: "There has been, in several documentable areas, stabilisation and even a decline of cases in pedophilia." Comment has been sought from the Truth Justice and Healing Council, which is co-ordinating the church's response to the royal commission. In the commission on Wednesday, evidence was given that NSW police told the Christian Brothers to transfer a member of the order accused of sexual abuse interstate or he would be arrested. The deputy head of the order's Oceania province, Brother Julian McDonald, told the commission he discovered what happened when he was made the NSW provincial in 1990. Council assisting the commission, Gail Furness, asked McDonald if there had been abuse allegations against two brothers which he accepted to be true. "There had," McDonald said. "Regrettably the police in New South Wales said to my predecessor 'transfer this brother interstate or we will arrest him'. "Now, when I came into the position, I found that incredible, quite frankly." The brother was transferred to a facility where he had no access to children, he said. Shortly after becoming the NSW provincial, McDonald said he became aware there were "several brothers who had offended". He said he reacted quickly to put the two brothers into treatment at a US facility called the St Luke Institute, but the pair had to agree to it. "I said to the brothers concerned, 'you're not going to have any contact with children, but I want some kind of assurance that you're not going to reoffend and, therefore, I want you to go and accept therapy'," McDonald said. "There's no guarantee about that, and there's no point in sending somebody to an institution like the St Luke Institute by force, so the brother had to agree to it." He told the commission neither brother had reoffended since receiving treatment, and one brother later admitted his offence and served jail time. Brothers joining the order are now required to complete a psychosexual assessment. McDonald said he informs the trainees directly. "[I] say 'there's been a history of brothers who are offending and it's important, therefore, that as a consequence of that, we know you're not a potential offender,'" he said. Over the past two weeks the commission has heard from 11 men abused at four Christian Brothers schools in WA between 1947 and 1968. Throughout the hearings, it has been established that the order's leadership was aware of abuse allegations against brothers as far back as 1919. The commission also heard how the order fiercely defended litigation against it in the 1990s by former residents of schools in Bindoon, Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun. McDonald said he had had no idea of the extent of the abuse when he became a provincial leader in 1990. "I have spent 25 years of my life trying to deal with the consequences of abusive behaviour by Christian Brothers," he said. "I will never deny it, I will never defend it, I will never condone it. Unless we address this, we have no credibility."
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