How Teary Qld Principal Failed His Duty

Australian Teacher Magazine
February 20, 2014

http://www.ozteacher.com.au/news/qld/how-teary-qld-principal-failed-his-duty/26475

On the fourth floor of Brisbane Magistrates Court, a former primary school principal is close to tears and trembling.

Terence Hayes was in charge at a regional Queensland Catholic school when pedophile teacher Gerard Vincent Byrnes sexually assaulted or raped 13 girls, aged nine and 10.

This wasn’t some horror story from half a century ago when child abuse was a taboo topic of discussion.

This was a classroom atrocity that happened less than a decade ago.

Hayes, who no longer works as a school principal, is being grilled before a packed courtroom as part of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

It’s late on Wednesday afternoon and Hayes’ eyes well up, after spending the better part of two days in the witness box being defensive and offering a series of one-word answers.

“I knew every child in my school. I knew 90 per cent of the parents by first name and so that catastrophic situation that happened, all that happened in the last six years has been central to me, but I’ve never forgotten where the real pain lies,” he said.

Hayes is the main attraction in court 17, at least for the media and some victims of child sexual abuse who want answers.

The audience and the commission want to know how a fourth grade teacher, who was also a child protection officer at the school, was able to commit 33 counts of indecent treatment and 10 counts of rape.

He was jailed for 10 years in 2010.

Hayes was first told of Byrnes putting his hands up girls’ skirts in September 2007 but the classroom predator’s employment only ceased when he was arrested in November 2008.

In January 2007, new Queensland laws came into effect, making it compulsory for schools to report to police or child protection authorities sexual abuse of any kind on a student under the age of 18.

At the time, all Catholic schools in the Brisbane archdiocese were given a “student protection and risk management kit” explaining their duties under the law.

But as a witness, Hayes struggled to explain why he disobeyed Section 366 of the Education (General Provisions) Act of 2006.

On his first day in the witness box, he said he didn’t want to compromise the bishop.

He explained how he went straight to his superiors at the Catholic Education Office (CEO) but not to police or child protection officials.

“The CEO told the principals that they were there to help us; they were the first port of call,” he said repeatedly.

The next day, during a savage grilling from the Catholic church’s legal counsel Jane Needham, SC, he admitted he knew about his obligation to tell police, after earlier saying he ignored the manual.

Hayes also admitted being told by superiors that he was obligated to report any child sex abuse claims to police.

Asked if he understood that those two positions were fundamentally inconsistent, Hayes replied: “Yes”.

Needham then put to the former principal that he lied during his court trial in 2009.

“I deny that,” he said.

In 2009, a magistrate accepted that Hayes had mistakenly believed he was required to report child sex abuse to his church superiors rather than police.

Under royal commission rules, statements made by witnesses are not admissible evidence in future criminal or civil court proceedings.

But the senior legal counsel for the commission could refer Mr Hayes to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for his inconsistent evidence.

Hayes, who now works as a year seven teacher, faces the ignominy of having to front a classroom, following yet another airing of his failures.

The pain he expressed from the witness box would be nothing compared with the lifetime of trauma faced by the girls he had a duty of care to protect.