EXPLOSIVE opinion commentary from Gerard Henderson regarding the (lack of and poor quality of) media coverge in Australia of the recent Australian Royal Commssion's Case Study 'wrap ups' for both the JWs and the Uniting Church in comparision to the Catholic....
ABC and Fairfax Media "out-to-lunch" when Royal Commission Conducted Public hearings into the Uniting Church Last Friday (after lunch)
Here’s some news which the ABC and Fairfax Media do not regard as fit-to-print. Over the past four decades, a child in Australia was much more likely to suffer sexual abuse at a school or institution run by the Uniting Church than at a school or institution run by the Catholic Church.
The ABC and Fairfax Media – along with The Guardian and The Saturday Paper – have given extensive coverage to allegations against the Catholic Church made at the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The ABC’s Samantha Donovan and Philippa McDonald and Louise Milligan along with Fairfax Media’s Rachel Browne and Joanne McCarthy have been perhaps the most outspoken of the journalists regularly reporting the Royal Commission in so far as the crimes of pedophile Catholic priests and brothers have been concerned.
The ABC and Fairfax Media gave considerable coverage to the statement by Counsel Assisting Gail Furness SC on 6 February 2017 that 4445 people alleged instances of child sexual abuse within Catholic schools or institutions up until 2015. Most media focused on the statement by Ms Furness that “7 per cent of priests were alleged perpetrators”.
However, virtually no media attention was given to Ms Furness’s subsequent clarification on 16 February 2017, with reference to the Catholic Church:
Between January 1980 and February 2015, 4,445 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse in 4,765 claims. The vast majority of claims alleged abuse that started in the period 1950 to 1989 inclusive. The largest proportion of first alleged incidents of child sexual abuse, 29 per cent, occurred in the 1970s.
In other words, within the Catholic Church the vast majority of
allegations of pedophilia were made with respect to alleged crimes in
the period 1950 to 1989 with close to a third of all allegations
relating to the decade of the 1970s. That is, most of the allegations
relate to instances of close to four decades ago and are historical
crimes.
In what was called the “Catholic Wrap”, Royal Commission
chairman Justice Peter McClellan devoted 15 entire days to examining the
Catholic Church. Hearings were held between 6 February 2017 and 26
February 2017.
On Friday 10 March 2017, the Royal Commission devoted
only half a day each to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Uniting Church
of Australia. Yet the evidence suggests that, on a per capita basis,
there were more pedophiles in each church combined than in the Catholic
Church – especially in the 1990s and subsequent decades.
...
The
statistics available to the Royal Commission with respect to the Uniting
Church cover the period from 1977 to the present. That is, unlike the
Catholic Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the allegations do not
relate to a period going back to 1950.
There were 2504 instances or
allegations of child sexual abuse made in the Uniting Church in the
period 1977 to 2017 compared with 4445 instances in the Catholic Church
covering the period 1950 to 2015. Yet the Uniting Church is about a
fifth of the size of the Catholic Church. And its data covers four
decades whereas the Catholic Church’s data covers over six decades.
Moreover, evidence available to the Royal Commission indicates that
virtually all offending by Catholic priests took place before 1990. Not
so, apparently, with the Uniting Church.
On this evidence, child
sexual assaults in the Uniting Church have been more prevalent than in
the Catholic Church – especially in the years since 1990. This despite
the fact that the Uniting Church has married male priests and female
priests. There is no celibacy requirement within the Uniting Church and
no sacrament of confession (in which the Royal Commission has taken a
special interest concerning the Catholic Church).
Yet you would not
be aware of any of this if you followed only the reporting of the Royal
Commission by the ABC, Fairfax Media, The Guardian and The Saturday
Paper. It seems the likes of Samantha Donovan, Philippa McDonald, Louise
Milligan, Joanne McCarthy and Rachel Browne did not come back from
lunch on Friday 10 February and simply missed the coverage of sexual
child abuse in the Uniting Church in the four decades since 1977.
A Note on Mark Scott and Knox Grammar.
This
is of special interest since Mark Scott, a one-time editorial director
at Fairfax Media’s Sydney Morning Herald and a one-time editor-in-chief
at the ABC, joined the board of the Uniting Church’s Knox Grammar in
late 2007 and was deputy chairman between mid-2013 and 2016. He resigned
from the board last year.
