AUSTRALIA
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
13 February, 2017
The Royal Commission’s report of Case Study 36 – The response of the Church of England Boys’ Society and the Anglican Dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney to allegations of child sexual abuse – was released today.
This report follows public hearings held in Hobart, Tasmania in January and February 2016 that investigated the responses of the Church of England Boys’ Society (CEBS) and the Anglican Dioceses to allegations of child sexual abuse made against lay people and clergy associated with CEBS in the 1970s and 1980s.
In particular, the Royal Commission examined the experiences of survivors of child sexual abuse perpetrated by convicted pedophiles Louis Daniels, Garth Hawkins, Simon Jacobs and John Elliot and alleged pedophile, Robert Brandenburg.
CEBS, which has now changed its name in some jurisdictions to the Anglican Boys’ Society and Boys’ Ministry Australia, was a youth group set up by the Anglican Church for boys between six and 16 years and had various branches within numerous dioceses of the church.
A network of sexual perpetrators
The report concluded that most CEBS branches could operate in an autonomous and unregulated way and that the abuse often occurred on camps, sailing and fishing trips as well as overnight stays at rectories and private residences.
As a result a culture developed in which perpetrators had easy access to boys and opportunities to sexually abuse those boys.
There were networks of sexual perpetrators at CEBS who had knowledge of each other’s sexual offending against boys and in some instances facilitated the sexual abuse of children, the report found.
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