AUSTRALIA
The Australian
STUART RINTOUL AND PIA AKERMAN
From:The Australian
April 23, 2013
THE Uniting Church has told a Victorian child abuse inquiry that it has paid about $2 million in compensation to abuse victims arising from 63 complaints in Victoria and Tasmania dating back to the 1940s.
But the Victorian parliamentary inquiry heard that the most recent allegation involving the “criminal abuse of children” was made in September last year, among seven more recent cases.
The church’s legal adviser, Philip Battye, said many of the historic abuse cases involved the Tally Ho Methodist boys home, which closed in 1986, but many of the home’s records had been lost or destroyed.
Mr Battye said of the 63 cases spanning the 1940s to the late 80s, a “smaller rather than larger” number had been referred to police, only one involved clergy and two-thirds of the alleged perpetrators were not church employees but people involved with church homes.
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