Page 1472 - Week 06 - Thursday, 2 July 2020
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Responding to the royal commission means acknowledging our collective failures as a community, our shared responsibility to protect children and our obligation to take action to hold offenders accountable. As I have said, and as I will continue to say, the abuse of a child is a terrible crime perpetrated against the most vulnerable in our community. It is a crime which cannot be tolerated. It is a fundamental breach of the trust which children are entitled to place in adults. With the deadline arriving, and passing, just two days ago, for organisations across Australia to join the national redress scheme, I am proud to say that the bill introduced today is the fifth and final piece of criminal reform legislation in this government’s commitment to implement all of the reforms recommended by the royal commission.
In responding, we have introduced new failure-to-report laws and new failure-to-protect laws. We have created protections for vulnerable witnesses, including through introducing a new intermediary scheme. We have reformed judicial directions and sentencing laws; we have created new criminal offences for people who are in positions of authority over children and who knowingly fail to protect them from sexual abuse.
The bill introduced today further improves access to justice for victims of child sexual abuse, addressing persistent child sexual abuse offences, amending laws governing tendency and coincidence evidence provisions, and clarifying that relevant disclosures in the setting of the religious confessional are not exempt from being used as evidence in court. Together, all of this work has been about building a safer society for children and a stronger legal framework for survivors.
The first specific area of reform in the bill contains amendments to section 56 of the Crimes Act 1900, regarding a sexual relationship with a child or young person under special care. The bill recasts the offence provision that has to date been named “maintaining a sexual relationship with a young person or person under special care”. This offence provision was the subject of amendments in March 2018, with the introduction of the Crimes Legislation Amendment Act 2018, which endeavoured to implement the royal commission’s recommendations regarding persistent child sexual abuse offences. A recent decision in the ACT Court of Appeal, known as KN v R, considered the construction of this section and found that in some respects the legislative intention to implement those royal commission recommendations had not been realised.
It is important to understand the difficulty faced by victims of child sexual abuse in giving adequate details of sexual offending against them. These difficulties were highlighted by the royal commission. They arise because children do not necessarily have a good understanding of dates, times, locations or an ability to describe how different events relate to each other on a temporal basis; or because there is usually a delay in reporting which may cause memories to fade or events to be wrongly attributed to a particular time or location; or because the abuse may have occurred repeatedly and in similar circumstances, so the complainant is unable to describe specific and distinct occasions of abuse. This has been described by a South Australian court as a “perverse paradox that the more extensive the sexual exploitation of a child, the more difficult it can be in proving the offence”.
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