Tag Archives: Sexual abuse

Law, Media, Politics

ABC embarrassed about its findings?

This post follows the previous post about the Victoria Education Department suppressing cases of sexual about in state schools as reported by Russell Jackson on ABC online. Gerard Henderson in the latest Media Watch Dog issue (1 Sept) asks why the ABC gave such scant coverage to such an important story (9000 words). He directed the question to management.

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Gerard Henderson to ABC management 1 September 2023

As you are no doubt aware, on Sunday 27 August 2023, ABC News Online ran a story by Russell Jackson titled “How the Victorian Education Department’s child sexual abuse scandal was hidden for decades”.

This was a very important article – running for around 9000 words – which documented how the Victorian Education Department covered up multiple cases of child sexual abuse in Victorian government schools for many decades from the 1960s on. This included moving pedophile teachers from school to school. According to Russell Jackson’s report – to this day the Victorian Education Department has declined to properly address historical child sexual abuse within its own schools.

As you will be aware, solicitors at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers appear regularly on ABC news and current affairs. In his article, Russell Jackson quoted John Rule (a Maurice Blackburn solicitor) as in the following:

“At first I couldn’t believe how common it was,” says John Rule, who leads the abuse team at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and has represented dozens of plaintiffs who’ve sued the Victorian Education Department in historical childhood sexual abuse matters.

“I tell people the Victorian Education Department are the worst to deal with, and that as far as cover-ups, they’re every bit as bad as the worst bits of the Catholic Church, and people can’t believe it.

“The cover-up was comprehensive, and they managed to slip through the gaps in terms of inquiries and royal commissions, so they’ve never been properly looked at or had their feet held to the fire. The extent of the problem has never been publicly documented, therefore the Education Department has never had to address it or grapple with it in any way.”

Indeed, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse did not examine a single case study specific to Victorian Education Department schools. Neither did the Victorian government’s own Betrayal of Trust inquiry of 2013, which probed only religious and non-government institutions.

So, according to Mr Rule, in its handling of historical child sexual abuse cases, the Victorian Education Department is “as bad as the worst bits of the Catholic Church”. Moreover, Mr Rule commented that the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, headed by Peter McClellan KC, did not examine even one government school in Victoria. In fact, McClellan’s commission totally ignored government schools in the whole of Australia.

Russell Jackson’s report got a 6 minute run on the ABC News channel on the afternoon of Sunday 27 August which featured an interview with Rightside Legal’s Michael Magazanik. I did not see the ABC evening news in Melbourne on that day. But, as far as I can see, Russell Jackson’s story was not covered by the likes of ABC TV Breakfast, ABC Radio National Breakfast, ABC Radio AM/The World Today/PM, ABC Radio Melbourne’s Mornings program on Monday 28 August.

This in spite of the fact that the above programs gave extensive coverage to the McClellan Royal Commission and to historical child sexual abuse in schools run by the Catholic and Anglican churches.

Currently the Andrews Labor government in Victoria has set up an inquiry into a nest of pedophile teachers at Beaumaris Primary School in Melbourne. The issue is much bigger than one school under the control of the Victorian Education Department.

My question is this. Why did the ABC give such limited coverage to such a big story which affected government schools – in view of the fact that it had given substantial coverage with respect to Catholic and Anglican schools on the same issue?

Australia, Feminism, Media, Politics, Radicalism

275 assaults per week?

On 3 August, a report appeared on ABC News online with the heading, Universities accused of failing to reach benchmarks to support sexual assault victims, fuelling calls for government intervention. The piece was the work of Claudia Long. Claudia is a ‘journalist’ stationed in the ABC’s Parliament House bureau in Canberra. She is no doubt in a position to throw out a well researched report on the (alleged) incidence of sexual assault on the campuses of Australia’s university.

No, not really. All she is expected to do is to regurgitate the manic outpourings of feminist activists who vie with each other for their hatred of men.

Among the details of the unrelenting abuse by male students of female students was the (alleged) numbers of sexually assault – a staggering 275 assaults each week. It was an extraordinary number hardly reflecting the daily experience of most people – extraordinary to the point of fantasy.

Fortunately, the men of Australia have Bettina Arndt to examine and comment on the outpouring of hatred that comes from feminist activists and their many government-funded organizations. Among those bitter feminists is paediatric specialist turned politician Dr Monique Ryan. Ms Ryan makes a good medical specialist as a politician for she seems not to understand that the role of a member of parliament is to promote the good of all people and not use her favoured position to give unrestrained vent to her prejudices.

Responding to the likes of Dr Ryan and the outrageous 275 assaults a week, Bettina Arndt wrote the article below.

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Inflating campus sexual assault statistics

– 275 campus sexual assaults a week is feminist disinformation.

30 AUG 2023

In recent weeks our proud Teal Independents have been busy showing their feminist credentials by supporting student activists seeking to force universities “to do more” about sexual assault on campus. “All of us women who have attended tertiary facilities in Australia know someone who has been raped while at university,” pronounced Dr Monique Ryan. Well, perhaps in your circles, Monique.

Wentworth’s Allegra Spender was on ABC radio jumping on board the ABC’s latest propaganda claim – that 275 people are sexually assaulted on our campuses each week.

Is that disinformation, or simply misinformation? This wild 275 headline figure has provided useful propaganda for media stories supporting Education Minister Jason Clare’s recent attack on the universities.  

The ABC attributes the statistic to the 2021 National Student Safety Survey. Yet Universities Australia, who ran the survey, said the 275-a-week claim was not in their survey results. It appears to have been cooked up by End Rape on Campus (EROC) activists who extrapolated from the tiny 2.7% of the student population who bothered to answer the survey to the whole student population and included it in a submission to the Federal Government.

(Funnily enough, they got it wrong by using 1.3 million for the student population, when government statistics show 1.6 M is nearer the mark. Haha, those pesky activists could have claimed 339 rapes a week if they’d got their sums right!)

The manufactured statistic was derived from an extremely dubious statistical manoeuvre, specifically warned against by the Australian Human Rights Commission which ran the previous survey. The Commission stressed the respondents were “self-selected students who were motivated to respond” which means these responses “cannot be regarded as representative of the Australian university student population as a whole.”

It’s rather like counting up the number of different models of car in a smash repair shop and using this to warn drivers about comparative safety of vehicles.  

Note that this calculation was based on the tiny 1.1% of students answering the survey who claimed to have been sexually assaulted in the previous year – using the broadest possible definition which included any sexual contact such as being kissed as well as any sexual activity involving drugs or alcohol. (About half of these assaults weren’t actually on campus but took place in private homes, clubs and other outside locations. So, they weren’t campus sexual assaults at all.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Culture, Political correctness, Religion

The Gay Priest Problem

At least eighty percent of clerical abuse cases are about a priest abusing a boy around fifteen years. It is male on male abuse. But in all the frenzy about Catholic priests in Australia abusing boys, none dare broach the subject of homosexuality. It is now open information gleaned from research and investigation, that the rate of sexual abuse rose in tandem with the entry of homosexuals into the male religious orders, not just priests. The sexual abuse was not the only result of homosexuals’ admission to the priesthood and male religious orders. In America, it is recorded that hundreds of priests died from AIDS. Fr Paul Shaunghnessy wrote about it on Catholic Culture online.

AIDS has quietly caused the deaths of hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States, although other causes may be listed on some of their death certificates, the Kansas City Star reported today. The newspaper said its examination of death certificates and interviews with experts indicates several hundred priests have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the mid-1980s. The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population, the newspaper said. Kansas City Bishop Raymond Boland says the AIDS deaths show that priests are human.

Astonishing, when you think about it. The paragraph above comes from an Associated Press report on a series of newspaper articles by Judy L. Thomas that appeared in January of 2000. It is too much to say Catholics were “rocked” by the attendant media hype—the scandal threshold has been raised pretty high in recent years—but among the laity the articles occasioned, if not a gasp, at least a general sigh of exasperation. From almost all sides one heard the complaint “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Why not indeed.

Read on…

Catholic Church, Law, Media, Politics, Religion, The Left

A friend speaks of Cardinal Pell

Pablo Elton – Macau Catholic Weekly

Cardinal Pell is being held in a prison in Melbourne, Australia. He awaits his sentence on March 13. He has appealed against his conviction on five counts of sexual abuse, allegedly for acts committed in 1996 or 1997. What has happened has shocked and hurt many people, especially Catholics. The general feeling is one of disbelief and surprise.

Nine months ago I had lunch with Cardinal Pell in a simple restaurant near his home in Sydney. From what I have read these days in the press, I realize now that he was already aware of the accusations formulated by the former choir member of Melbourne Cathedral. At lunch we talked, among other things, about the reason for his return to Australia; he told me that he wanted the truth to come to light, as he has repeated many times. And the truth, as he has also repeated on countless occasions, is that those events never took place. During that meal I realized that he was already prepared to suffer what is now a reality.

Read on…