EVEN a year after a pedophile had been jailed for abusing children while he worked for the YMCA, the organisation still had not carried out a full audit of working with children checks.
Catharine Clements, who was employed by the not-for-profit organisation as child protection and compliance officer in July 2012, told a hearing in Sydney that within a few weeks it had become clear to her the YMCA's concepts of child protection and child care were blurred.
Ms Clements was let go four months later.
In a document tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Monday, she said her main concern was the closed nature of how business was done at the Y.
"There was an unspoken anxiety (among staff)... an unease about raising concerns with managers," Ms Clements said.
She said she saw it as critical to children's safety that anyone who works with them can have access to managers.
"There appears significant levels of bullying and concomitant levels of personal distress", Ms Clements wrote in a document she put together to clarify her concerns and difficulties in doing her job with the association.
She denied to Gregory Sirtes, SC for the YMCA, that she wrote the document after she had left, saying she had written it during her employment to articulate for herself the difficulties.
She was submitting it only now because she had mentioned it to one of the legal counsels for the NSW government who had asked for it.
Ms Clements also told the commission that the YMCA Human Resources manager had told her they had initiated a working with children check (WWCC) across all staff after the Jonathan Lord incident.
One year on, that audit was still not completed, she said.
There were 1,800 checks completed and 400 still to go. A year after Lord was arrested the audit was still ongoing.
Asked by Mr Sirtes why she had not outlined her staff bullying concerns to Liam Whitley, the child services manager to whom she was reporting, she said she did not feel she could raise it yet.
"I had the same problems raising concerns as other staff."
Her communication with Mr Whitley was through email and she raised issues with him weekly because she did not get another face-to-face meeting with him until she had been in the job 10 weeks.
She told the commission she found it very hard to get clarification from the YMCA about what exactly they wanted in terms of child protection.
The hearing continues.
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