Nt Abuse Hearing to Be Held in September

Sky News
August 25, 2014

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2014/08/25/nt-abuse-hearing-to-be-held-in-september.html

A Baptist home in the Northern Territory where mixed-race and Aboriginal children were sexually assaulted over three decades will be the focus of the next hearing to be held by the national inquiry into child abuse in institutions.

The hearing scheduled for Darwin on Monday, September 22 will hear from men and women who were sexually abused as children at the Retta Dixon Home between 1946 - 1980.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will also examine how the evangelical Baptist organisation, the NT and commonwealth governments responded to allegations of abuse against workers who were employed at the home.

The home was run by Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) which was founded in 1905 by a Baptist Missionary, Retta Long (nee Dixon).

It began work in the Northern Territory in the 1930s and ran the Retta Dixon Home at Bagot Reserve.

In 1998 the organisation changed its name to the Australian Indigenous Ministries.

The hearing, which is expected to run for two weeks will look at the response of the NT's police force and the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1975 and 2002 to allegations raised by residents of the Retta Dixon Home against Donald Henderson, who was a house parent at the home from 1964 - 1975.

The commission will also inquire into current NT laws and policies governing children in out-of-home care as well as redress schemes available to the Retta Dixon Home abuse victims.

The NT inquiry is the last one listed on the published 2014 schedule of the commission.

Other hearings are planned but it is still awaiting a government decision on a requested two-year extension until 2017 and a $104 million increase in funding before it locks in its schedule.

Unless it gets the extra money and time extension, private sessions, beyond those already scheduled, cannot continue, the commission has said.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has signalled that the request is likely to be granted.

'I'm confident that we will be able to respond to the royal commissioners' wishes.'

'We want it to do its job. We've supported it every step of the way ... It should finish its job,' he said in a radio interview last week.