AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Jeff Sparrow
By one of those peculiar historical coincidences, Cardinal Pell appeared before the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse just as the conservative attack on Safe Schools reached its peak. In doing so, he provided a striking example of why the program matters so much.
Several years ago, when working on my book Money Shot, I asked Save the Children’s Karen Flanagan, one of the country’s most experienced advocates for children’s rights, about the forms that child abuse took in Australia.
“Intra-familial abuse, that’s the most common,” she said. “Most children are abused by someone very closely related to them or very well known to them – in other words, a trusted, respected person. About a third of all sex offending is committed by adolescents, about 6% of reported sex offences are by women and the rest is by men. Probably about 95% would be intra-familial.”
In other words, most abused children know the perpetrator.
“If it’s not within the home,” Flanagan said, “it’s the babysitter, or the school or the sporting club. It’s people who know the child, who have a relationship with him or her, who are trusted.”
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