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