Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ran from 2013 to 2017 and produced, in December 2017, one of the largest public inquiries into institutional child abuse ever conducted anywhere: 17 volumes of findings and 3 further volumes of recommendations, examining religious and secular institutions side by side rather than singling out any one tradition.

Its Catholic Church findings addressed the same reassignment and concealment pattern documented in the United States, Ireland and later Pennsylvania, and went further than most prior inquiries in its recommendations, suggesting dioceses consider voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy and calling for mandatory reporting laws that admit no exemption for information disclosed in religious confession.

Its Jehovah's Witnesses findings are among the most detailed public record that organisation has ever had examined by an outside authority. The commission obtained the organisation's own internal case files, which recorded allegations of child sexual abuse against 1,006 members going back decades, with no corresponding pattern of reporting those allegations to police. The commission examined the organisation's internal "two witness rule," under which an accusation is not acted upon internally unless corroborated by a second witness, a standard the commission found effectively shielded abusers whose crimes by nature have no witnesses, and it recommended the organisation abandon that rule for handling abuse specifically. By placing two different religious bodies' institutional failures in the same public record using the same evidentiary standard, the commission's report is one of the few sources that lets the pattern be compared across traditions rather than assumed to be unique to one.

Most of the Australian Royal Commission's findings on religious institutions concerned Catholic dioceses and Jehovah's Witnesses congregations, both already documented on this atlas. But among its 57 public hearings was Case Study 22, held in Melbourne over two weeks in February 2015, examining two schools of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Orthodox Judaism: Yeshiva Bondi in Sydney and Yeshivah Melbourne.

Of the 4,029 people who told the Commission across its whole inquiry that they had been abused in a religious institution, 25 named a Jewish institution, and 15 of those named Yeshiva Bondi or Yeshivah Melbourne specifically. The Commission examined the two institutions' response to allegations against six individuals. Three convictions came out of the matters the case study covered: David Cyprys, a security guard and caretaker at Yeshivah Melbourne, was convicted in 2013 on five counts of rape by jury verdict and pleaded guilty to twelve further charges, and was sentenced to eight years in prison with a five and a half year non-parole period by the County Court of Victoria; Daniel Hayman was convicted in 2014; and David Kramer, a teacher, was convicted in the United States and sentenced there to seven years, of which he served four before being extradited to Australia, where he pleaded guilty to five counts of indecent assault and one indecent act with a child under sixteen against four students and was sentenced to three years and four months.

The Commission's findings report concluded that the response of the institutions' rabbinical leadership had been "wholly inadequate," and it heard evidence that mesirah, a Jewish legal concept prohibiting reporting a fellow Jew to secular authorities, was allowed to discourage reporting to police even after rabbis publicly stated it did not apply to child abuse. Its central recommendation: every Jewish institution in Australia should state explicitly, in its own complaint handling policy, that mesirah does not apply to reporting child sexual abuse.