Royal commission hears Christian Brothers failed to act on brothers accused of sex abuse

By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Perth Now
May 6, 2014

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/royal-commission-hears-christian-brothers-failed-to-act-on-brothers-accused-of-sex-abuse/story-fnii5s3z-1226907592834

The Royal Commission has been told that evidence of sexual abuse at Christian Brothers schools in Perth stretches back to just after the end of the First World War.

The Christian Brothers' own historian identified 70 brothers around Australia who had complaints made against them mainly of sexually abusing boys between 1919 and 1969, the child sex abuse royal commission has been told.

There were 18 of them who were repeat offenders while one had five separate complaints and another four complaints.

Yet from 1945 the institution's leadership appeared to have gone soft and not one brother was expelled from the order.

But their bosses in Ireland were more concerned and there is evidence of Brother Duffy from Dublin writing to Australian Provincial Garvey in 1959 “trying to impress on him that there was a problem”, the commission was told.

“It seems that as we moved from the 1940s to the 1950s, that increasingly the responses to a complaint was to tell the brother about the complaint and if the brother denied it, nothing more was done,” counsel assisting Gail Furness SC said.

The files and reports uncovered by the order's historian, Brother Barry Coldrey, when he prepared a book to mark their 100 years anniversary in Australian in 1994 revealed that the abuse was thought to be a moral failing, a breaking of the vow of chastity, but not a criminal offence.

In 1953, Brother Parker, who had been the subject of allegations by some of the former child migrants to the royal commission, was noted as having “difficulty with the second vow”.

It was said that he was “beset by his own inner troubles”.

Other brothers were said to have ”weaknesses” involving boys and finding it difficult to conquer those weaknesses.

In 1965, Dublin wrote to the provincial brother in charge of Australia: “For anyone with the tendency there is danger for another outbreak and we are bound to protect both the boys and the good name of the institution ... bound to do all that we can to remove any possible danger of recurrence.”

The commission, sitting in Perth, is looking into the handling of complaints of sexual and physical abuse at four of the Christian Brothers' notorious orphanages and homes in Western Australian between 1947 and 1968.

The first conviction of any brother was in 1919, they have heard.

The hearing continues.