An Australian researcher says while the child sexual abuse Royal Commission pushed strongly for better child protection measures, it did not acknowledge safeguards already in place had lowered rates of offending.

Virginia Miller, a research fellow at the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University, has just published a book on abuse inquiries in Australia, Ireland and the United States.Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence was published by Firenze University Press last month.

Dr Miller’s assessment of the evidence presented to the inquiries led her to two conclusions. Firstly, abuse within the Church peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and is largely an historical problem. Secondly, the safeguarding measures introduced in the Church during the 1990s have been effective in curbing child sexual abuse.

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