AUSTRALIA
Anglican Communion News Service
[ACNS] Royal Commission examining allegations of child sexual abuse in Australia has delivered a damning verdict on a system which enabled a culture of abuse to flourish.
The report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse comes after public hearings into how the Church of England’s Boys’ Society (CEBS) and the Anglican dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney dealt with claims of abuse. The hearings, in Hobart, Tasmania, were told of allegations of abuse by lay people and clergy associated with CEBS in the 1970s and 1980s.
The report concluded that most CEBS branches were able to operate in an autonomous and unregulated way. As a result, a culture developed in which attackers had easy access to boys and opportunities to sexually abuse them. It found the abuse often happened at camps, on sailing and fishing trips and on overnight stays at rectories and private homes.
The report also found that there were networks of sexual predators at CEBS who had knowledge of each other’s offending. A number of abuse survivors told the hearing they were shared by abusers or their abusers were aware of the conduct of other attackers.
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