AS A certain red-haired politician once said, “please explain”. While the question in that instance may have been directed to a television reporter, this time, it’s the Anglican Church which should receive a red card. Despite huge amounts of time and an avalanche of evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Anglican Church has failed to achieve a nationally consistent approach to child sexual abuse due to lack of consensus between its 23 dioceses.
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The inquiry into how the church has responded to child sexual abuse was told a national body was established to develop child protection standards that were enacted by the general synod in 2004. But not all dioceses have adopted the Professional Standards Commission's models or have only partially implemented them over the past 13 years, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard.
Understandably, Garth Blake SC, a Sydney barrister and chairman of the church's Professional Standards Commission, told the hearing the inaction left him "deeply" troubled.
"Part of the strategy ... of the Professional Standards Commission has been to try and develop best-practice policies," he told the royal commission. What we have seen over the past 13 years is that they have not been picked up by all dioceses and that's a matter of profound disappointment to me.”
"We have made a lot of progress but the fact that there is this fragmentation has led to ... different standards of care around what should be core minimum standards."
If you have any doubt about just what a failure this is, data released by the royal commission shows almost 1100 people alleged they were sexually abused as children in Anglican institutions, with 22 out of the 23 dioceses identified in the report.
That was 22 out of 23. It’s a figure worth repeating and pondering, especially when it is noted that the data, according to a report in The Daily Advertiser this week, shows 64 complaints of child sexual abuse related to alleged incidents in the 2000s and 18 related to alleged incidents in the 2010s.
Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald told the hearing the lack of consensus among the dioceses was "almost inexplicable".
"It seems astonishing that the Anglican church is still not capable of putting aside relatively minor differences to come to a common approach," he said.
The commissioner may have been guilty of a massive understatement there. There is simply no excuse for the church’s actions, which represent failure on a massive scale. How many more examples does the church want before it acts?
Perhaps the clue to the massive failure lies in what Audrey Mills, a member of the Anglican Professional Standards Commission told the hearing when she said that dioceses retained autonomy under the church's constitution.
"Diocesan autonomy is something which each diocese very much values, seeks to retain, and that has been a real barrier," she said. "It is almost embedded in the culture."
I don’t care who messed up or why. The collective butts of anyone in the church hierarchy need a collective kicking. Time’s up for churches and other organisations that – for whatever mealy-mouthed excuse – don’t seem to think they need to act to protect children. Sadly, I reckon they’d react like the proverbial scalded cat if someone mentioned a different issue like, says, revoking their tax-free status.
