Sexual assault counsellors have warned that the government’s national redress scheme risks creating classes of “deserving” and “undeserving” survivors of child sexual abuse.



The government plans to prevent people convicted of serious crimes from accessing compensation for past child sexual abuse through the proposed redress scheme which is before parliament.

The redress scheme was one of the key recommendations of the child sexual abuse royal commission, but the royal commission made no recommendation to prevent convicted criminals from accessing the scheme.

The government said the measures were needed to preserve the scheme’s integrity, but critics said it ignored the clear relationship between past child abuse and subsequent offending.

On Friday a Senate inquiry examining the proposed redress scheme heard from sexual assault counsellors, who warned against barring those with serious criminal histories.

Gary Foster, a former police officer who manages counselling clinics for male survivors of abuse, said 1,000 people in Queensland correctional facilities had come forward to the child abuse royal commission, a disproportionate number of whom were Indigenous.

“This will set up deserving and undeserving and it will actually legalise that, and the people who will feel it most will be the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities,” he said.



“It is an injustice for people who have, through no fault of their own, often placed for their own care and protection, ended up on a trajectory which meant they were in prison, and in prison for a very long time.”



Miranda Clarke, from the Centre Against Sexual Violence at Logan in Queensland, said those who experienced childhood sexual abuse in care-giving environments suffered lifelong consequences.



“It affects their ability to develop as a child and they miss key developmental stages, which means that’s something that can’t necessarily be fixed,” she said. told a public hearing in Canberra.



“It’s not something that can be cured with appropriate treatment, and it’s something that will be triggered throughout their lifetime.”

Data from the royal commission showed it had conducted private sessions with 6,875 survivors as at 31 May 2017, and about 10% of them were in prison at the time.

The federal government’s model differs in several other ways from the blueprint laid out by the royal commission.



The government wants to place a cap on maximum compensation of $150,000 to survivors, rather than the $200,000 cap, $65,000 average, and $10,000 minimum recommended by the royal commission.

Later on Friday, the inquiry heard the decision to set the lower maximum cap was made by ministers, before the Department of Social Services was asked to begin designing the scheme.

Barbara Bennett, a deputy secretary with the Department of Social Services, told the inquiry that the decision to cap the scheme was “made by the government at the point in time where our department was handed over the design to develop a scheme”.

“That decision was made by the government before the scheme was given to our department,” Bennett said.

She said that the average payment under the government’s proposed model would be higher than the $65,000 recommended by the royal commission.

“What I would like to point out though is that the royal commission’s estimation of a $200,000 cap was that the average payment would be about $65,000 … we couldn’t replicate that,” she said.

“The average payment is likely to be [$76,100], so in the sense of what the royal commission said would be an average, in fact that’s a higher level.”



The government’s redress scheme would also make it harder for non-citizens or non-permanent residents to get compensation.



The sexual assault counsellors urged the government to allow family members of child abuse survivors to access a national redress scheme, and for it to provide lifetime counselling and treatment.

“The effect of the abuse on one person in a family extends out to the whole family and to the community,” said Laurel Sellers, from the Yorgum Aboriginal Corporation in Perth.



Clarke said the trauma of abuse was often carried by family members and loved ones of survivors, and spread across generations.