A Canberra child safety campaigner will call for blanket mandatory reporting requirements as the public part of Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concludes on Friday.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Bravehearts ambassador Damian De Marco will deliver a withering assessment of the capability of religious institutions to change, despite the upheaval of the royal commission.
"We are now in a position where even the rape, buggery, molestation and often suicide of hundreds of thousands of innocent children worldwide by clergy and religious leaders, has still not been a sufficient enough motivating force for some religious Institutions to reform their cultures," Mr De Marco will tell the commission.
"Even today we have cases of paedophile priests being secretly housed with children and institutions conducting inquiries disguised as independent investigations. If they don't get it now they never will."
Mr De Marco is due to speak as part of a panel of seven survivors who will have the last word at the last public hearing of the royal commission, after almost four years.
The panel will present their vision for children in Australia for the future, and what changes they would like to see as part of the royal commission.
Mr De Marco will call for all investigations of alleged abuse in institutions to be undertaken by the state or with government oversight.
He will also suggest all adults be subject to mandatory reporting laws.
"Failure to report must be regarded as a crime and punished accordingly with strong penalties not excluding incarceration," Mr De Marco will say.
Royal commission chair, Justice Peter McLellan said by the end of the the inquiry, the royal commission will have held more than 8000 private sessions, sat for 400 days in public and heard evidence from more than 1200 witnesses.
"The information we have now gathered through private sessions and other means has identified more than 4,000 institutions where the abuse of children is alleged to have occurred," Justice McLellan said.
"It is remarkable that failures have occurred in so many institutions. It is now apparent that many of the characteristics of failure within institutions are common, although there are sometimes significant individual characteristics."
