IN 2007 the Catholic Church agreed to pay $660 million to 508 child sexual abuse victims in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, just as the church was forced to confirm its knowledge of allegations against notorious Hunter paedophile priests Vince Ryan and Denis McAlinden over decades.
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The Los Angeles agreement was the highest church compensation settlement in the United States to that time, involving allegations against 221 priests, religious, teachers, employees and volunteers.
In the same year the church paid $200 million to 144 victims in San Diego. Three years earlier it paid $100 million to 91 victims in Orange county.
Those payouts, of an average $1 million or more for each victim, reflect the devastating consequences of clerical child sexual abuse on people's lives, as demonstrated so distressingly during public hearings of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse since 2013.
The American payouts also highlight the disturbingly low compensation paid to Australian victims under capped church schemes and responses heavily criticised during those hearings, but which victims were almost forced to turn to because of a civil justice system heavily weighted against them.
The royal commission has released data analysis of three Australian Catholic dioceses and child sexual abuse hotspots - Maitland-Newcastle, Ballarat and Melbourne - that reveals for the first time the consistency and high number of complaints against the church, and the disparity of compensation paid between dioceses.
Maitland-Newcastle diocese, which for a number of years pursued its own compensation process after concern about Towards Healing, has paid substantially more compensation in total, and higher individual payments to victims, than Ballarat and Melbourne.
After years of confidential church settlements, the royal commission has shone a light on the level of child sexual abuse over decades and the relatively low level of compensation paid to Hunter victims - although high by Australian standards - whose lives have been devastated.
The data analysis also silences denialists who still argue – despite the evidence – that abuse survivors make allegations only in pursuit of compensation. The facts show survivors just want the truth.
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