AUSTRALIA
ABC – The World Today
KIM LANDERS: At the child sexual abuse Royal Commission hearings in Hobart, the former governor-general Peter Hollingworth has given a personal apology to an abuse survivor.
Dr Hollingworth told the commission his handling of the man’s abuse complaint, when he was Archbishop of Brisbane in the early nineties, was misguided and wrong.
Samantha Donovan is following the commission hearings and joins me now.
Samantha what has this abuse survivor told the royal commission about his dealings with the then Anglican Archbishop Hollingworth?
SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Well Kim the survivor witness BYB has given his evidence to the commission this morning and he told them that he was closely involved with the Anglican Church and the Church of England Boy’s Society in Queensland in the 1970s when he was a boy, and that from the age of about eight to 13 he was sexually abused by an Anglican lay preacher, John Elliot, who later became a priest.
Now BYB gave evidence that when he was in his twenties, he decided to complain to the church about his abuse and alert it to Elliot’s offending. Elliot by then an ordained priest and the rector of the Dalby parish in Queensland.
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