AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
December 5, 2017
By Charlotte King
The Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse has released a damning report into the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat, describing its handling of clergy child sex abuse as a “catastrophic failure of leadership”.
The commissioners found a culture of secrecy and failures in the church’s structure led to children being abused across the diocese over a number of decades.
“That failure led to the suffering and often irreparable harm to children, their families and the wider community,” the report stated.
“That harm could have been avoided if the Church had acted in the interests of children.”
The royal commission report is based on three public hearings into Ballarat — the first case study to look at the affect of child sexual abuse on an entire town.
The hearings, held over 2015 and 2016 in Ballarat and Sydney, revealed in gruelling detail the extent of child sex abuse across parishes, schools and homes in the far-reaching diocese.
Ninety per cent of the 140 abuse complaints reported to the diocese related to seven priests, with more than half of those relating to one individual, the infamous paedophile Gerald Ridsdale.
More than 100 pages of the report were dedicated to his crimes across western Victoria, where he was given 16 appointments over a period of 29 years.
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