Church faces new claims of child sex abuse and neglect

One of several Scientology buildings in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Supplied.

CANBERRA - Further allegations against the Church of Scientology, including claims of child sex abuse and neglect, have renewed calls for an inquiry into the organisation and its operations in Australia.

The allegations, accusing the church of cover-ups and the mistreatment of children in a toxic environment, follow earlier, alarming investigations and a failed bid for a Senate probe.

Among those making the new allegations is the daughter of the president of the church in Australia, and police are investigating a claim a senior official interfered with an investigation into the reported sexual abuse of an 11-year-old girl.

The claims have been denied by the church, which supported its rebuttal with statements by members who were raised as children of the elite, praising their upbringing.

The allegations, aired on ABC radio's investigative Lateline programme, add to previous reports used to strengthen political efforts to force an official inquiry into the activities of the church in Australia.

In March leading anti-Scientology campaigner Senator Nick Xenophon tried to convince the Senate to open an inquiry into the church's tax-free status, backed by an ABC Four Corners report, the complaints of former members, and "hundreds" of letters raising new allegations.

Four Corners reported claims of forced abortions, imprisonment in boot camps and families split apart, all of which were denied by the church.

But both Labor and the Coalition voted against a Senate inquiry, noting the existence of other tax inquiries and the danger of the Upper House becoming a "de facto criminal investigations bureau" for the disaffected.

Yesterday Xenophon said the latest allegations could not be ignored.

"The best way of dealing with [them] ultimately is to have a judicial inquiry to get to the truth of what's occurred and to make recommendations so that this sort of thing doesn't happen again," he said.

Lateline interviewed Scarlett Hanna, the daughter of Australian Scientology president Vicki Dunstan and former public affairs director Mark Hanna, supported by Sheila Huber, a former executive establishment officer in Los Angeles.

Scarlett Hanna's parents are members of the elite circle known as Sea Org. She grew up in a now-disbanded group called Cadet Org, who she said were separated from their parents and lived in overcrowded conditions without adequate food or medical care.

"The best way I can describe [the treatment of children] is as cattle," Scarlett Hanna said.

"We were property of the organisation [and] although they would like to say that we weren't we were. It was an incredibly lonely childhood."

At 13 Scarlett Hanna was sent to live with adult members of Sea Org in inner Sydney, living a largely unsupervised life from 9am to midnight, and dodging classes at what she described as one of the city's roughest schools.

"I was being bullied and bashed and so I just stopped attending school," she said.

"I started hanging out in parks because I was so socially isolated and this led me to being raped by a convicted murderer and running away."

Huber told Lateline that she had worked for Sea Org as a nanny for Cadet Org children.

She had no training and had sole care of 30 children under 3 packed into a one-bedroom apartment.

"I couldn't believe it," she said. "It was wall-to-wall cribs."

In further allegations Carmen Rainer, the daughter of a Scientologist, said she had been abused by her stepfather but had been told by a senior officer, Jan Eastgate, the abuse was her fault and had been coached to lie to the police. Eastgate was at the time head of the church's anti-psychiatry Citizens Commission on Human Rights. She now is the head of the commission's international head, based in Los Angeles.

"They told me it was my fault because I'd been bad in a past life," Rainer said.

She said she had been told that if she did not lie to police she would be taken from her parents and never see them again.

The church has denied the claims.

It said Rainer's claims were "false, highly defamatory and vigorously denied".

"Not only did church staff help facilitate Carmen and her mother to report the matter to the proper authorities at the time it happened in 1985, it was only through the intervention of the church that the man responsible ultimately turned himself in to the police and was prosecuted," the church said.

It declined direct comment on the Hanna allegations because they were a "private family matter between Scarlett and her parents".

But it said her remarks were not in accordance with the experiences of others who had grown up as Cadet Org children, who said they had lived rich and fulfilling lives.

The statement included six supporting statements, including one from 22-year-old Bindy Bennett, a second-generation Scientologist who said she had lived with Hanna in the Cadet Org for four years.

"Scarlett was very close to her mum and I observed that she would spend a lot of time with her at the church ... [and] stay with her after school most days," Bennett's statement said. "She was also close to her dad."