No more buck passing on child protection

No more buck passing on child protection

SICKENING is not too strong a word to describe what has been revealed by Ombudsman George Brouwer in a report to State Parliament on the management of registered sex offenders. Mr Brouwer discovered that hundreds of Victorian children have been exposed to unacceptable risk - and some sexually assaulted - because of breakdowns in the system created to protect them. He concludes that this exposure to danger was the result not of oversights or errors by individual bureaucrats or officials failing to meet their responsibilities; rather, it was caused by a systemic breakdown in the management of sex offenders. In other words, the institutions charged with protecting our most vulnerable citizens - Victoria Police, the Department of Human Services, Corrections Victoria and ultimately the state government - have failed in that task.