Not Australian, but it’s a legal thing in America (for some crimes) where someone can get out of being liable for something if someone realistically should have stopped it. There are city clerks that have gotten out of embezzlement charges because their scheme was so obvious that someone should have noticed and stopped it long before.
Doubt this applies to being a pedo, but this type of thinking is codified in law. We can be disgusted by a pedophile being a pedophile, but this is a statement that speaks to wider systematic issues.
That’s stupid
I’m American and I want an example of someone getting away with a crime because it was so obvious that someone should have noticed.
Not necessarily getting away with the crime, but I was referring to Rita Crundwell, a town clerk who embezzled over $53 million dollars over the course of 30 years. The town had a total population of 15k. She literally just wrote fake invoices for shit and deposited it into another account. Then proceeded to spend it a prize horse and mansion with absolutely no explanation of where the money came from. She still was held responsible, but got off fairly light because she was so brazen that someone else should have caught it earlier.
Coincidentally, Ronald Reagan’s childhood hometown. Started during '83 as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Yet as disturbing as the raw numbers were, they sold short the devastation wrought by Reynolds’s decades of rampant abuse of children placed in his care at government-run schools, reflecting only the reported cases of those who’d both survived their ordeals and mustered the strength to endure the justice system’s lengthy and often dispiriting delays.
Like few judges before her, Justice Gabriele Cannon took aim at the Victorian Education Department, affirming a systemic crisis previously unacknowledged and validating the fury of generations of government school students whose trust had been betrayed by teachers like Reynolds.
Soon after Cannon concluded, lawyers for survivors seized the moment, not just foreshadowing costly civil litigation but claiming the Victorian Education Department had, more broadly and for decades, maintained a system of cover-ups that placed generations of school children at risk of sexual abuse.
But with passion and application, she thrived; so impressive was her command of the classroom during an early teacher-training placement at a small rural primary school, a lecturer asked if he could film Brown’s class and show it to teachers college students.
By the end of her second year at Nambrok West Primary, Frances Brown recalls she was wracked by the “overwhelming sense that I had to protect my little ones”, so did what her teacher training had taught her to do and resolved to share her concerns with the Victorian Education Department’s district school inspector for the Traralgon region.
At Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), among the more alarming artefacts of the Victorian Education Department history is a battered, leatherbound ledger book whose handwritten entries catalogue the daily operations of the Teachers Tribunal between 1946 and 1977.
The original article contains 8,896 words, the summary contains 276 words. Saved 97%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
