A culture of ignoring children helped child sex abuse go undetected, the Anglican Church says. Source: AAP
TWO of Australia's largest churches say it's up to the people who were sexually abused as children to go to the police.
The Anglican and Uniting churches in Victoria have together paid more than $2.25 million in compensation to victims over the past 10 to 15 years but have only referred a small number of allegations to authorities, a Victorian inquiry has heard.
Melbourne's Anglican Archbishop Dr Philip Freier says a culture of disbelieving children who complained of sex abuse and an unwillingness to face up to difficult and shameful things had helped the crime go undetected.
"As you look backwards you can see broadly as a culture we've not readily listened to children when they've made complaints," Dr Freier told the parliamentary inquiry on Monday.
"There have been opportunities for people who wanted to breach the trust of children to do that, and often for children's accounts of that trust being broken, being disbelieved.
"Some were even punished for having raised a question about the conduct of an adult."
He said this was the case for many community organisations not just churches.
Clergy have been responsible for most of the 46 incidents where a child sex abuse complaint has been made to the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne since the 1950s, the inquiry heard.
The church has paid out $268,000 to 10 victims since 2003, but only reported 12 of the 46 complaints to police.
The Uniting Church, which has $2 million in compensation since 1998, said "very few" of the 63 victims in the synod of Victoria and Tasmania had their cases referred to police.
Both churches said they did this to spare the victim further trauma.
Dr Freier said in the cases of historic abuse the church encouraged people to work with a solicitor as they didn't want to risk "revictimising" the complainant.
It's policy to report current allegations.
The Uniting Church synod's legal adviser Philip Battye said it was up to complainants to go to police if they wanted.
"Numbers of care leavers don't want the police to be involved," he said of people who had left children's homes operated by the church.
The church has no records before 1998 of child sex abuse complainants seeking compensation but acknowledged abuse had probably occurred and poor record keeping was to blame for the lack of information.
Mr Battye said it was "theoretically possible" that some alleged perpetrators were still involved with the church, potentially dealing with children.
"I can't say I'm totally confident that they're not but these complaints do go back many years," Mr Battye said.
"We are talking about 30-plus years ago."
The Uniting Church defended legal claims of sexual abuse against its members by invoking the statute of limitations, he said.
"If there are legal proceedings then the church will plead the limitation defence, because it's open to the church to do so," he said.
He said most of the perpetrators were not clergy or employees of the church and were, for example, a spouse of a 'cottage parent' looking after children in the homes.
Victorian and Tasmanian synod general-secretary Reverend Mark Lawrence said the Uniting Church in Australia had apologised unreservedly for any harm that occurred to children while in its care.
"The church continues to offer personal apologies to those who seek them."
Dr Freier said he wished he could undo the harm that had been done.
"It is unfortunate that we cannot change the past, I wish I could - but I give a real and genuine commitment to enhance the processes and culture of our organisation," he said.
"The abuse of children has no place in our society."
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