More than 4,400 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse to Catholic Church authorities in Australia between January, 1980, and February, 2015, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told.
Gail Furness, SC, senior counsel assisting the inquiry, told a Sydney hearing that data gathered by the Catholic Church and then independently analysed showed the claims of the 4,444 people related to more than 1,000 separate institutions and that some 1,880 alleged perpetrators were identified as a result of the claims as well as more than 500 “unknown people”. It could not be determined how much the known and unknown groups of perpetrators overlapped.
Ms Furness said that of the 1,880 identified alleged perpetrators, 32 per cent were religious brothers, 30 per cent were priests, 29 per cent were lay people and five per cent were religious sisters. Ninety per cent were male.
The data also showed that the average age of people who made claims of child sexual abuse were 10.5 years for girls at the time of the abuse and 11.6 years for boys while the average time between the alleged abuse and the data a claim was made was 33 years.
Other data presented by Ms Furness, based on a Royal Commission survey of 75 Catholic Church authorities with priest members, showed that between the period 1950 and 2010, some seven per cent of priests were alleged perpertrators. But in some religious orders as many as 20 per cent of members were alleged perpetrators, rising to as high as 40.4 per cent of the St John of God Brothers.
Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, told the hearing that the data represented “a massive failure on the part of the Catholic Church in Australia to protect children from abusers.” “As Catholics, we hang our heads in shame.”
