FM defends lack of child sex warning

FM defends lack of child sex warning

AUSTRALIA: Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Tuesday defended a decision not to warn people against using child care facilities at two luxury resorts in Bali, despite two Australian children allegedly being sexually abused there.

The families of the two children, aged three and five when the alleged assaults took place, said they felt Downer's department had failed them by turning down a request from Justice Minister Chris Ellison to issue warnings.

In a program to be screened late on Tuesday, ABC television reports a three-year-old was sexually abused and contracted gonorrhea while she was at a daycare center at an up-market resort in the Balinese town of Nusa Dua in 2001.

It said a boy was orally raped in an attack at another Bali resort two years later.

The girl's mother, using the pseudonym "Evelyn", said she wrote to the foreign affairs department asking for a warning about the nurseries to be included in official government travel advisories but was told it was unnecessary.

The boy's aunt, who was not named, said the government had not treated the problem seriously. --AFP