AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
Katie Burgess
Seventeen people associated with Catholic religious orders have been accused of abusing children in the Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra-Goulburn over six decades, analysis of the church’s own data has revealed.
The ACT and southern NSW diocese also had an above average concentration of religious accused of sexually abusing children, with two orders implicated in abuse cases in Canberra counted among the most notorious.
A survey of church data by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse revealed 8.4 per cent of the 211 religious who served in the archdiocese from 1950 to 2010 were believed to have abused children. This equates to one in 12.
Nationally, 7 per cent of religious were believed to have abused children over 60 years.
However, the Canberra Archdiocese had a far lower concentration of alleged perpetrators than the Diocese of Sale, where 15.1 per cent of members were implicated, the Diocese of Sandhurst (14.7 per cent) and the Diocese of Port Pirie (14.1 per cent).
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.