Up to 85% of child abuse in England undetected study says, Paedophile ring used boys home

"An ''organised ring'' of paedophiles believed to include Anglican and Catholic clergy used a Sunday afternoon ''children's Christian program'' in the 1970s to sexually abuse boys at a church-run Wallsend boys home."


Up to 85% of child abuse in England remains undetected, study says

Ben Quinn  Monday 23 November 2015 

Urgent action is needed to identify and prevent child abuse according to a major new study that suggests only one in eight victims in England comes to the attention of authorities.

About 50,000 cases of sexual abuse were recorded by police and local authorities in the two years to March 2014 but the findings indicate that official figures vastly underestimate the true scale of child sexual abuse. The actual number of children abused in that period is thought to be as many as 450,000.

The report, by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC), found that about 85% of sexually abused young people are not receiving help and treatment.

The majority of victims remain unidentified because the services that should protect them, including police and social services, rely on children to speak out, says the report. Two-thirds of cases, both known and unknown to the authorities, are believed to be victims of abuse in the family.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/24/85-percent-child-abuse-england-remains-undetected-study 


Paedophile ring used boys home
September 23, 2013   Joanne McCarthy

An ''organised ring'' of paedophiles believed to include Anglican and Catholic clergy used a Sunday afternoon ''children's Christian program'' in the 1970s to sexually abuse boys at a church-run Wallsend boys home.

''These men just came, got the boys, used them, and put them back,'' said a Hunter woman whose husband has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse he was sexually assaulted by multiple offenders at Woodlands Boys Home.

The United Protestant Association has issued an unreserved apology for the ''tragedy'' of what occurred to child sex victims at Woodlands, where some of the smallest and youngest boys were targeted by the Sunday group.

''From what the victims have told us, these men changed from week to week, suggesting a larger, organised ring,'' UPA general manager Steve Walkerden and after-care support worker Graham Hercus said on Friday.

''We are aware of a group of men who did come to the home in the 1970s for a number of years on a Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to conduct a children's Christian program, but who routinely took smaller boys into downstairs rooms in the building and abused them.''

Anglican priest Peter Rushton - acknowledged by the church in 2010 as a sexual abuser of children - and ''volunteer carer'' and convicted child sex offender Robert Holland, are believed to have taken boys from the home, or to have had links with Woodlands.

A third ''volunteer carer'' at Woodlands was quietly convicted of child sex offences more than a decade ago....

''If the boys reported what happened, they were flogged. My husband can still hear it today, the screaming of the boys when they were taken downstairs and flogged for saying what had been done to them.''....
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/paedophile-ring-used-boys-home-20130922-2u7w6.html