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Boy
Raped When He Reported Abuse
By Annette Blackwell Geelong Advertiser
January 29, 2014
http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/news/national/boys-aged-4-punched-by-salvo-officer/story-fnjbnvyf-1226812941825
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Wally McLeod has told the
royal commission that he saw children as young as four
punched. Source: AAP
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A BOY who told a Salvation Army officer
he had been sexually abused by another boy was later raped by
the officer, an inquiry has been told.
A man, identified as ES, said he ran away several times
from a Salvation Army Training Farm at Riverview in Queensland
when he was a teenager but was always brought back, either by the
farm manager, Captain Victor Bennett or police.
Mr Bennett who has since died, is one of five officers
against whom the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to
Child Sexual Abuse has heard numerous allegations.
The commission is holding a public hearing in Sydney
into what happened at four homes run by the Salvos in NSW and
Queensland in the 60s and 70s.
ES said on Wednesday he was locked in a cage on the
veranda at Riverview - some times for weeks.
There was no bed or blankets and a bucket was used as a
toilet in the cage, which some boys called a 'holding cell' or
'lock-in'.
He said after time in the cage he was sodomised by Cpt
Bennett, to whom he had reported being molested by an older boy.
ES had been placed in an orphanage in NSW when he was
four. At age 11 he was moved to St Vincent's Boys Home at
Westmead, Sydney where he was sexually abused by a Marist
brother.
He ended up at Riverview in Queensland where: "I felt
Captain Bennett hated me from the start."
He told of punishments like being made to crawl around
naked holding up a dead chook and naked boys being made to run
around a maypole.
At Wednesday's hearing several witness statements were
read.
A man identified as GK wrote of the profound hate and
anger he felt and could not shake off from the time spent at
Riverview.
He told of psychological, sexual and physical abuse when
he was 12.
"I feel sorry for the people who have tried to help me
at times and have been hurt by my hate against society".
He had been told by a Salvation officer his parents did
not want him and later found out letters sent to him by his
parents and brothers were kept from him.
He applied to get the letters, held by the Queensland
Children's Department, under Freedom of Information.
In 2006 he told the Salvos: "We will be getting letters
from the dead. God help me when I get them..."
Another man FP said residents at Riverview lived in
constant fear. They were beaten for talking or laughing.
He was asked by Simeon Beckett, counsel representing the
commission, if he had told state welfare officers who regularly
visited the farm of floggings and sexual abuse by officers and
older boys.
FP said he had not because of "fear of what was going to
happen to you if you opened your mouth".
Both FP and another witness EY told of being sexually
assaulted by older boys. EY ran away when he was 16. Police
picked him up four months later sent him back and he was severely
flogged with a razor strap.
Earlier on Wednesday Wally McLeod, who was a resident at
Indooroopilly Boys Home and Riverview Training Farm from 1960 to
1966, said he saw Victor Bennett grab children as young as four
and punch them.
The commission, in this and future hearings, will
examine in detail if the Salvation Army dismissed and/or
transferred officers about whom there were complaints.
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