AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 April 2014
The Salvation Army moved and promoted an officer who confessed to abusing an eight-year-old girl, an inquiry has been told.
News of his promotion and the officer’s continued contact with her family contributed to the child’s mother having a nervous breakdown, the royal commission into child sexual abuse heard on Wednesday.
The mother, JH, said via videolink her daughter was always a “gentle soul” but became more quiet and withdrawn after she was abused by then Captain Colin Haggar in 1989.
JH ran the local op shop for the Salvation Army in a central-western NSW town. She said that in 1989 she and her husband had been visited by Haggar, who confessed to sexually abusing their daughter, who was eight or nine at the time.
We “just sat there in disbelief” when Haggar told us “it wasn’t that serious, I only fingered her”, she said.
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