AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
Michael Short: Judy Courtin, thank you for your time, and welcome to The Zone.
Judy Courtin: Thank you, Michael, for inviting me.
MS: You are you a lawyer do a PHD on sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Can we begin, please Judy, with the size and scope of the issue?
JC: This is something we don’t know. This is one of the very important issues or questions that an inquiry, a properly constituted commission of inquiry, should be doing. So we don’t know the prevalence, we don’t know the incidence.
There is one known statistic coming out of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, which says that about 10 per cent of adults who were sexually assaulted as children will ever report to the police. The process called the Melbourne Response – that is, the process set up by the Melbourne Archdiocese to investigate complaints against Catholic clergy, reported about a year ago that about 450 complaints had been lodged since 1996.
Recently the Archdiocese said they had investigated about 330 complaints. Either way, if that represents that 10 per cent figure, that’s a lot; between 3,500 and 4,500. That is just the Melbourne Archdiocese. The Melbourne Archdiocese only deals with diocesan priests. They don’t deal with all the religious orders such as the Christian Brothers or Salesians, for example. And the Melbourne Archdiocese is just one geographical area. So, if we have a possible 3,500 to 4,500 victims just from diocesan priests, how many victims are there across the state?
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