Sexual abuse victims at Retta Dixon home will be offered compensation and an apology

SEXUAL abuse victims at the Retta Dixon home will be offered compensation – and an apology – from the religious organisation that ran the notorious Darwin facility.

Retta Dixon Home. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

SEXUAL abuse victims at the Retta Dixon home will be offered compensation – and an apology – from the religious organisation that ran the notorious Darwin facility.

The home for indigenous children has been at the centre of recent royal commission hearings into institutionalised child sexual abuse.

The Reverend Trevor Leggott, the head of Australian Indigenous Ministries, the group which ran the home for 20 years, said last month he knew nothing about the horrendous crimes until the national inquiry was under way.

Mr Leggott has filed papers with the commission offering an unreserved apology and to pay compensation to victims.

“I have previously stated that AIM was not in a position to offer any financial compensation to the victims of sexual abuse that occurred at Retta Dixon home,” he said in a statement. “The general council of AIM has ... reconsidered its position in relation to this matter.”

READ: ROYAL COMMISSION INTO RETTA DIXON

The religious group proposes to sell a property, worth about $350,000, at Winmalee in the NSW Blue Mountains and put proceeds into a trust.

“It should be made clear that the Winmalee property is set aside for AIM’s operational activities in NSW (and) as a consequence of the sale of this property, this will have a very significant impact upon AIM’s activities in NSW.

“Nevertheless, AIM will sell the Winmalee property in recognition of its moral obligations, expressed in the form of redress, to the victims of sexual abuse.”

Mr Leggott apologised during his evidence to the hearing, but his words were rejected as abject, insincere and made “at five minutes to midnight” by a barrister representing six of nine victims.

In his latest submission, he says the apology was rejected partly because the group had not initially offered any financial compensation.

Nine former residents have told the inquiry about harrowing physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their carers.

A former house parent, Donald Henderson, was twice committed to stand trial over the sexual abuse, in 1976 and 2002, but both times prosecutors dropped the charges for a lack of evidence.