Ballarat suffered an epidemic of child rape and torment

The Australian
May 19, 2015

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/ballarat-suffered-an-epidemic-of-child-rape-and-torment/story-e6frgd0x-1227359887818

Today the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse begins public hearings in Ballarat. It is a Herculean task.

Much but not all of the abuse occurred within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic Church’s Ballarat Diocese. The Royal Commission has examined profound failures to protect children in a range of institutions, religious and secular, government and non-government. This time it must deal with the sordid business of Catholic clerical abuse within the Ballarat Diocese.

The Ballarat Diocese extends across most of western Victoria, from Portland in the southwest of the state along the south coast, excluding Geelong, all the way north to the border city of Mildura in the state’s northwest corner. There is not a country town or city in that vast geographical space not affected by clerical child sex abuse.

It was an epidemic of rape and torment of children. I have ventured that nowhere in Australia has there been more institutional child sex abuse and as far as I know nowhere else on the planet.

Some of the culprits are well known. There is Gerard Ridsdale, a now laicised priest serving an 18 year jail sentence. By his own admission he counts his victims in the hundreds. There is Christian Brother, Robert Best jailed for 14 years. Many of his victims lived in the Ballarat diocese.

And finally there is Monsignor John Day, a name that has stubbornly refused to seep into the national consciousness. Day has been the subject of more than a hundred Towards Healing claims. He was a pedophile who monstered children for five decades in Horsham, Ballarat, Apollo Bay, Beech Forest, Colac, Ararat and Mildura.