Sir, - In the course of attempting to explain the Christian Brothers' record of violence towards children in their care as revealed in the recent States of Fear documentaries, John Waters (Opinion, June 15th) claims that Australia has long had a high level of tolerance towards brutality in both home and school and that this existed before the Christian Brothers arrived.
I am not sure on what evidence this claim is based. Perhaps Mr Waters has in mind Australia's penal beginnings or the violence of the 19th-century war with the indigenous population, much of which occurred before the Christian Brothers finally committed themselves to Australia in 1868. However, if we come to the post-war period with which the documentaries predominantly dealt, the claim is hard to sustain.
Australia is not a particularly violent society. Current homicide rates, for example, are only slightly higher than those in Ireland: 1.7 per 100,000 compared with 1.2. Both of these are at the lower end of the rates experienced by comparable Western countries and a good deal behind the United States at 7.4. Similarly, despite the forthright language in which political debate is conducted, Australia has experienced very little political violence.
The key relevant difference between the Irish and Australian experience is that, in the context of a developing welfare state, Australian governments took responsibility for many of the tasks which were in Ireland left to the Church. There were thus mechanisms of political accountability which provided some check against abuses. Most of the population was educated in state-run schools, and although corporal punishment was common, it was generally bureaucratically regulated and has been progressively phased out since the 1950s.
Child welfare was similarly a responsibility of the government. The child welfare system which developed in Australia used a mix of institutional care, fostering and adoption, and financial support for community organisations. It has a mixed record, and an appalling one in relation to Aboriginal children, but the abuses which took place in some of those institutions cannot be taken as evidence of a general tolerance of violence towards children. More recently, Australian feminists have pioneered the use of state agencies to control domestic violence, forcing police to take violence in the home seriously and working to provide state-funded refuges for its victims. - Yours, etc.,
Judith Brett, Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History, UCD,Dublin 4.