Church's Melbourne Response to be focus of child sex abuse inquiry
|
Version 0 of 1. The parents of Emma and Katie Foster, repeatedly raped by a Catholic priest when they were young girls at Sacred Heart primary school in Victoria, have been among the most vocal about the gross flaws in the method of handling sexual abuse cases by the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. Called the Melbourne Response, it will be the focus of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse public hearings starting on Monday in the state’s county court. The scheme has been widely criticised by victims and their families throughout the course of the commission, for lacking independence, and for capping compensation payouts to victims at $75,000. The serial abuse of the Foster girls from the late 1980s and into the early 1990s by paedophile priest Kevin O’Donnell had a brutal and lasting effect on the Fosters. Emma died of a drug overdose in 2008, when she was just 26 – a suicide following years of self-harm and depression. Katie suffered depression and turned to drinking. In 1999, when she was 15, she was hit by a car after a drinking binge, and is now in a wheelchair with permanent brain injuries. Their mother, Chrissie Foster, will be one of three witnesses providing evidence to Monday’s hearing into the Melbourne Response, introduced by now Vatican financial controller Cardinal George Pell in 1996, and which handled hundreds of sexual abuse complaints. Her husband, Anthony, will support her in court, and will read out half of her witness statement. There, they will watch Pell give evidence via video link from the Vatican, where he will be asked about the scheme he helped to implement and has in the past defended. It will not be the first time he has come face to face with the Fosters. They met with Pell privately in May to share their criticisms of the scheme – the main ones being that it lacked independence and was notoriously self-investigating, and that capping compensation payouts to victims at $75,000 was vastly inadequate. “Well, the major thing we expect to come out of this hearing is an immediate overhaul of the Melbourne scheme so that there is no cap on payments, and so existing claims are revisited in a way where the process of investigation is completely divorced from the church,” Mr Foster said. “I am extremely hopeful that will be the case as that was the information we had from Pell during our meeting with him that was promised to us by Archbishop [of Melbourne Denis] Hart. “We expect they will provide details of the revised scheme during the hearing.” However, he was not confident the hearings would result in a self-inflicted breakdown by the Church of their existing processes. “It’s something that has to be forced upon them through public opinion,” he said. Many witnesses have shared evidence with the commissioners through private sessions, which are confidential and take place in an informal setting rather than a courtroom. The royal commission CEO, Philip Reed, told Guardian Australia that there were more than 1,200 people currently in the queue for a private session. “The demand for private sessions has remained steady since the royal commission commenced them in May 2013,” he said. “This year up to 50 private sessions are being registered each week with this figure trending upwards slightly in recent months.” If people are unable to attend a private session they can still share their story with the commission by providing a written account. In June, the commission requested an extra two years and $104m to finish its job. The federal government had yet to inform them whether they would receive that extension. “If the royal commission is not extended we cannot hold private sessions for any person who contacts us after September or October this year,” Reed said. “This will deny many survivors the opportunity to share their experiences with us, in particular those from vulnerable or hard-to-reach groups.” He said one of the most important outcomes of the commission was to bring about cultural change within institutions to prevent and better respond to child sexual abuse. If an extension of time was granted, he said, key institutions being examined would also be requested to report publicly on what they had done to implement such change since the hearings began. The commission’s hearings into the Melbourne Response are expected to last two weeks. • Support is available for those who may be distressed by phoning Lifeline 13 11 14; Mensline 1300 789 978; Kids Helpline 1800 551 800. |