Parents angry at abuse payouts
September 25, 2003 Sixteen families are incensed and offended by the Catholic Church's decision to offer them up to $100,000 in compensation for the sexual abuse of their disabled children.
The families, who are among 33 affected by the abuse committed by a bus driver at St Ann's special school between 1987 and 1991, have been offered a total of $2.1 million but have been told by Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson that counselling for their children will end within two months.
Karen Rogers of Parents Advocacy Inc said Archbishop Wilson's offer had strings attached because he had called for the payments to be "offset" against any damages awarded in future civil actions.
One mother said the church had offered her disabled son compensation -- the church has called it a financial "gift" -- but said his counselling would cease on November 23.
"I'm so bloody angry I don't know what to think," she said.
"They're conniving, lying bastards -- and that's praising them.
"This is their consultation and pastoral care.
"We've been told my son will need counselling, intermittently, for the rest of his life, and they're cutting it off."
Her son is one of 34 children who suffered from the sex abuse crimes of Brian Bertram Morris Perkins, 67, sentenced this month to 10 years' jail after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting three Down Syndrome boys attending St Ann's between 1987 and 1991.
Archbishop Wilson said he had taken advice from church legal, insurance, welfare and education advisers before making the "generous" offers.
He said three families had been offered $100,000, 10 had been offered $75,000 and 20 families -- one of them with two children -- had been offered $50,000 for each abused child.
Archbishop Wilson's letter to the families makes it clear the church is not seeking confidentiality agreements and does not regard the payments as a bar to civil legal action by victims' families.
However, the mother claims the church has attempted to cover up the abuse of her son, then 14, now 32, for years.
"The church denied it all flatly until Perkins pleaded guilty," she said.
"I caught him in the school woodshed with my son," the woman said. "And the school knew about it -- they were told by at least three people."
SF & P Webb wrote:
Church's $2.1m ends 'hush money' for sexual abuse
By Penelope Debelle and Natasha Wallace
September 25, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/24/1064083060449.html
The Catholic Church has made an unconditional offer of $2.1 million to 34 families of sexually abused children, a decision a senior church figure says signals the end of "hush money" payments.
The Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, made the offers of up to $100,000 this week, setting a new moral and financial standard for settling sexual abuse claims.
The money has been offered to parents and guardians of disabled students from the former St Ann's Special School in Adelaide who were abused by a bus driver employed by the school.
"I would hope that any pattern of paying 'hush money' to people would cease, if it's been going on," Archbishop Wilson said. "I have never felt comfortable about the inclusion of confidentiality clauses in agreements that have been made."
Archbishop Wilson sent the offers to parents earlier this week, specifying that confidentiality clauses forbidding the victims from revealing the abuse not be signed and that victims not forgo rights to take civil legal action.
The offers, characterised by Archbishop Wilson as a gift, were contained in letters received yesterday by the parents or guardians of 34 students, many of them with Down Syndrome, who attended St Ann's Catholic School in the Adelaide suburb of Marion between 1987 and 1991.
"I have been personally shocked and angered at the abuse of these children, who are among the most vulnerable in our society," said Archbishop Wilson, who is the chairman of the church's National Committee for Professional Standards and a member of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference.
A bus driver, Brian Perkins, 67, was jailed earlier this month for 10 years for abuse of students committed on a bus and in a woodwork class. He pleaded guilty in the South Australian District Court to videotaping, photographing and sexually assaulting three boys with Down Syndrome at the school.
The crimes had been known about since 1991 when police found pornographic photos of students at Perkins's house. But they were dealt with last year only after Archbishop Wilson asked the South Australian Police Commissioner, Mal Hyde, to pursue Perkins, who had fled to Queensland.
Three payments of $100,000, ten of $75,000 and 21 of $50,000 went beyond those previously paid in other states but reflected the circumstances of this abuse, Archbishop Wilson said.
Parents were free to pursue civil action, he said, and it was reasonable any subsequent court-ordered damages would be offset against the Church's offer.
A senior Victorian Catholic church official, Vicar-General Len Tomlinson, said yesterday that abandoning confidentiality clauses recognised current Catholic responses to abuse claims.
"I don't think anybody in the church does [insist on confidentiality] these days," he said.
Monsignor Tomlinson said that Archbishop Wilson had acted within current church policy on sexual abuse: "We would be continuing along in the same direction."
