Child abuse thrives in conditions of secrecy and cover-up. Disclosure is perhaps our greatest weapon in the limited armoury we have against it. Yet as of the 1 July 2015, the Border Force Act imposes a two-year prison sentence for any ‘entrusted person’ who makes a record of or discloses ‘protected information’. As there is no explicit exclusion of health workers reporting on child abuse, World Medical Association leaders have said they must assume that this ‘extends to doctors working in refugee centres who report on their observations arising from their work.’

The most interesting and far-reaching of these new laws is the failure to disclose offence. This law came into effect on the 27 October 2014 and states that all adults in Victoria must report any ‘reasonable belief’ that a sex offence has been committed by an adult towards a child under the age of sixteen years. Failure to disclose is a criminal offence, punishable by up to three years imprisonment.

Currently, we do not know how many victims there are of institutionalised Jewish child sexual abuse. It is naïve to believe that Manny Waks and his two brothers are the extent of it. Regardless of who else comes forward, abiding by the religious tradition of miserah has done untold damage to the lives of the Waks family and, ironically, to the Jewish community itself.

I wanted to pick up on Michael Brull's recent post at Overland on the proposed Royal Commission into child sexual abuse. I think there are likely to be a number of structural and systemic issues likely to dog the Commission and its aftermath, and they are worth looking at.