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[4 January 2007] - Cases such as the alleged rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl by her father will continue to happen if there is no royal commission into child sexual abuse in Australia, a Queensland child advocacy group says.
The girl's 39-year-old father, who was being treated for a mental illness, was remanded in custody after appearing in Brisbane Magistrates Court charged with her rape and murder. The circumstances of the case will be independently reviewed by Queensland Children's Commissioner Elizabeth Fraser. The state's child safety and health departments will also hold independent reviews after it was revealed the family was known to the child safety department. Bravehearts executive director Hetty Johnston said she had high hopes the inquiries would improve the fate of children in danger of abuse. But she called for more to be done nationally. A national problem "That might help us here in Queensland but the trouble with all of this is it's a national problem," she told AAP. "We keep dealing with it in little ad hoc ways in each state rather than addressing it as a national problem." Ms Johnston said a federal government royal commission supported by each state was well overdue. "It's about bloody time," she said. "We've got 20 per cent of our national population of children, 20 per cent, one in five kids sexually assaulted before the age of 18. "We've got jails full of people who've been sexually assaulted and psychiatric wards full of people who've been sexually assaulted, morgues full of people who've been sexually assaulted, family law courts are choked up." Those one in five kids deserved major action from all governments, she said. "If there were some new disease was out and reared its ugly head that struck down one in five of our kids and there was no cure, or we didn't know what the cure was, or we knew there was one and we had to find it, we'd have a royal commission in about two seconds flat," she said. "We'd be spending all kinds of money." The father's solicitor has said his client had been under an Involuntary Treatment Order for mental illness and was only released from the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital on December 22. Discovery of body The girl's body was discovered in the bedroom of a holiday home at Bongaree on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, by her brother and sister on Tuesday. The Department of Child Safety said it knew the family as a result of "low-level concerns" which did not meet the threshold for an official notification. But it had no knowledge of the father's mental health status. A Queensland Health spokesperson said there were insufficient concerns to report the man to the Department of Child Safety. The Australian Medical Association Queensland (AMAQ) has called for a doubling in the number of hospital beds for the state's mental health patients. Meanwhile, the state coalition has called for better communication between the Child Safety and Health departments and the police. Further information Â