Child sex abuse royal commission hears ...

By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Daily Telegraph
June 11, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/child-sex-abuse-royal-commission-hears-paedophile-marist-brother-dressed-students-up-before-abusing-them/story-fni0cx12-1226950543459

Marist Brother John Chute, known as Brother Kostka, has been the subject of today’s child sex abuse royal commission.

Marcellin College at Randwick.

Child sex abuse royal commission hears paedophile Marist brother dressed students up before abusing them

A NOTORIOUS paedophile Marist brother made one boy dress up in women’s clothing and then kiss him, the child sex abuse royal commission has been told today.

The 65-year-old man said he still found it difficult to talk about it even 53 years later.

He said that Brother Kostka Chute, then aged about 26, had told him there was going to be a school play at the Marcellin school in Randwick.

“I was dressed up like a Mandarin woman,” the man said.

“The thing was that there was never going to be a play. It was like the whole thing was invented in order for Brother Kostka to have physical contact with me.”

The royal commission is investigating how Brother Kostka and another paedophile, Brother Gregory Sutton, were moved around schools and allowed to teach despite the order being told that they were abusing boys and in Sutton’s case, also abusing girls.

The commission has heard how Brother Kostka, 82, instilled fear and intimidation in his pupils by bringing a number of canes into the classroom. Using a candle, he would meticulously burn the ends of the canes to make them “sloped” at the end.

“After he finished working on his canes, he would whoosh them around and smack them against his cassock and of course we were all supposed to be working and not watching,” the 65-year-old man said.

Brother Kostka was sexually abusing pupils on a daily basis, putting his hands down their pants at the front of the classroom, the commission has heard.

“The events occurred in his office, in his dark room, in his garden shed behind the monastery, in the chapel, in the monastery, at a picnic spot ... wherever and whenever he felt he could do it without being interrupted or caught,” one victim has told the commission.

He is now living in a Marist home after serving two years in jail for 19 counts of sexual abuse involving young boys.

The hearing in Canberra continues.