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The Presbyterian Church community in Dunedin is looking in to a historic paedophile ring operating within the church community.
The Church has appointed a senior King’s Counsel (KC) to investigate allegations that arose during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care hearing last month.
The Church has agreed terms of reference with the KC who will act as an independent investigator.
Rev Wayne Matheson, executive secretary of the Church assembly, told the ODT “the hearing was the first the church had heard of the allegations”.
Once the Royal Commission gives permission to access the material the investigator will start work.
Matheson said the Church and the Presbyterian Support Otago (PSO), are separate organisations and, because the church was a separate entity from the PSO, it would investigate allegations that relate only to Presbyterian church members.
Records destroyed
Allegations that records were deliberately destroyed in 2017 and 2018 surfaced during a Royal Commission hearing on 19 October.
The Commission heard that in 2017 a “senior decision-maker” at PSO undertook a review of records held about children who lived in its residential homes. They decided apart from a register of names and dates, the record would be destroyed.
Details of historical abuse suffered by children and their subsequent struggles to get redress, were outlined when PSO chief executive Ms Jo O’Neill gave evidence at the Royal Commission.
Asked if the decision to destroy the records could have been influenced by the formation of the royal commission, O’Neill, who began with PSO in 2019, said she would only be speculating. She believed the PSO would have been aware that there were plans for a commission.
O’Neill says she recalls reading mentions of a paedophile ring situation relating to a case raised in 2020.
In response to questioning by Commissioner, Paul Gibson, O’Neill said neither the Church nor the PSO have investigated what happened to children in their care.
The PSO has received six complaints relating to 1950 – 1960 and three between the late 1980s and 1991, when the facility closed at the Glendinning Presbyterian Children’s Home (pictured).
The PSO also operates two other homes.
The complaints were made between 2004 and 2019.
Evidence provided to the Royal Commission by Cooper Legal alleges abuse from the age of 5 to about 14.
The ODT reports the allegation includes “being passed around a ring of paedophiles comprised of Presbyterian Church parish members, being beaten with objects and once being tied to a flagpole while naked as punishment for grieving her father’s death”.
In 2018, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand wrote to the Government asking it to extend the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care to include faith-based organisations.
In April 2022, the Royal Commission said it was extending its Anglican investigation to include the Presbyterian, Methodist and Salvation Army faiths, and that this will be known as the ‘Protestant and Other Faiths Investigation’.
The Commission has investigated state-integrated but not state schools, nor charismatic Christian megachurches such as Hillsong.
The Ministry of Education’s Sensitive Claims of Abuse in State Schools investigates and responds to claims of sexual abuse in state schools.
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