The Hon Tanya Plibersek MP
Minister for Social Services
The Hon Michelle Rowland
Attorney-General
Today marks the 7th anniversary of the National Apology to Victims and Survivors of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.
The appalling abuse endured by vulnerable children by the very people who were supposed to care for them, left immeasurable and lasting damage.
Today we are announcing the Albanese Labor Government has taken further steps to strengthen decisions of the National Redress Scheme relating to abuse in medical settings - often referred to by victims and survivors as virginity testing.
The practice was a clear, shameful contravention of basic human rights.
We have now updated how the Scheme considers abuse in medical settings to classify virginity testing as sexual abuse.
We have also appointed additional Independent Decision Makers to increase consistency and speed of redress for survivors. As a result, the Scheme has seen an uptick in application processing with a 63 per cent increase in applications resolved in September compared to the previous month.
Since the Redress Scheme was established in 2018, over $1.7 billion dollars in redress payments has been paid to survivors. There are more than 600 non-government institutions now participating in the Scheme, covering more than 70,000 sites across Australia. But we know there is more to do.
We are working through further policy and administrative improvements to process applications faster. This means, identifying where applications are systemically getting stuck in administrative processes and finding solutions.
Separately, the Government is continuing to work across governments and organisations to deliver the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse 2021-2030, which responds to approximately 100 recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
As part of the Strategy, the Government continues to roll out the national 'One Talk at a Time' campaign - which seeks to educate adults with children and young people in their lives about child sexual abuse and encourage ongoing, proactive, and preventative conversations.
The Government is also leading Working with Children Checks reforms, which will result in meaningful national consistency between the systems, removal of barriers to information sharing between states and territories, and the development of a National Continuous Checking Capability to ensure criminal histories are captured and shared nationally in near real time.
