AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
November 13, 2017
By Danny Tran
Police forces failed in their duty to protect Australian children because they often refused to believe their complaints about sexual abuse, the royal commission’s chairman says.
Child protection agencies also failed to listen to children, leaving them in situations of danger, Justice Peter McClellan said in some of his final remarks before the commission’s final sitting.
The chairman of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse gave a speech in Melbourne this afternoon, critical of Australia’s major social institutions for seriously failing to protect children from paedophiles.
“It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’,” he said.
“The problems have been so widespread, and the nature of the abuse so heinous, that it is difficult to comprehend.
“Across many decades many institutions failed our children. Our child protection, criminal and civil justice systems let them down.
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