AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
January 14, 2019
By Joanna Menagh
A retired Catholic priest has avoided being sent to jail for sexually abusing a teenage girl more than 50 years ago when he was in charge of a WA home for Aboriginal children taken from their families.
Allan John Mithen, 80, pleaded guilty to two charges of indecently assaulting the girl when she 15 and 16 in 1965 at the Wandering mission, about 120 kilometres south of Perth.
She had been removed from her family when she was four years old and taken to the mission, where the District Court was told she was sexually, physically, emotionally and psychologically abused.
Mithen’s crimes happened just after he was appointed as the superintendent of the home when he was aged about 26.
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