AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Australian Associated Press
Sunday 16 November 2014
It was a disgraceful failure of the Northern Territory legal system that a paedophile escaped being tried for sexually abusing a five-year-old girl, a solicitor has told the child sex abuse inquiry.
Mark Thomas, representing the Rev Trevor Leggott, who heads Australian Indigenous Ministries (AIM), said that what happened to children at the Retta Dixon home in Darwin in the 1960s and 70s was “short of killing them, the worst possible example of abuse of a child”.
The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse sat in Sydney on Monday, taking submissions following a September hearing into the Retta Dixon home.
One of the main alleged perpetrators of abuse at the home, run by AIM, was house parent Donald Henderson, who worked there for 11 years.
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