AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
August 22, 2014
Rob Hulls
This week the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse turned its attention to the Melbourne Response – a process established by the city’s Catholic Archdiocese to address the sexual abuse complaints accumulating against the church. Like much of the evidence presented to the Commission, the hearings included stories of lives and trust destroyed – shattered not only by individual perpetrators, but by the obfuscation and bellicose approach of the responsible institution.
Witnesses spoke of being discouraged from reporting to police; and of the distress of having their allegations accepted for the purposes of compensation offers, yet being told that these same allegations would be strenuously defended should they seek instead to go to court. Certainly, sexual assault complainants are often met with a theatre of evasion – from denial to legalistic defences which trivialise the complaint or disparage the complainant; from responses framed only in terms of compensation, to settlements which prevent victims from speaking out.
Startlingly, however, this week’s hearings also revealed that the Catholic Church has spent around $17 million on administering this process – an equivalent sum to the total it has paid out to approximately 350 victims whose complaints it has accepted. These payments have averaged a modest $30,000, with a cap at $50,000 (more recently raised to $75,000), yet the Independent Counsel who determined the complaints has been paid $7 million since being engaged in 1996.
This approach is obviously out of kilter with the community’s expectations – with as much invested in shielding the church’s reputation as in supporting those who seek its help. Yet too often this is the case in the wider adversarial process – the elaborate series of hoops which any claimant must jump through obscuring the advantages of bringing the claim. This means that, although Archbishop Denis Hart is now considering a further review of the Melbourne Response’s compensation cap, as well as whether past cases should be re-examined, we need to ask whether tinkering at the edges of institutional responses is ever sufficient.
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