Salvation Army child sexual abuse at Eden Park home under spotlight at Royal Commiss

By Nigel Hunt
Courier Mail
September 13, 2015

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/salvation-army-child-sexual-abuse-at-eden-park-home-under-spotlight-at-royal-commission/story-fnii5yv5-1227525290878

THE physical and sexual assault of dozens of young homeless boys at the Salvation Army’s former Eden Park home in the Adelaide Hills will be the subject of a public hearing next month.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will sit in Adelaide from October 6 — with abuse victims, Salvation Army officials and former state government welfare workers to give evidence.

Several former Salvation Army officers have faced the courts charged with physical and sexual abuse of children at Eden Park during the 1960s and 1970s. One of them, William John Ellis, has been jailed for 16 years for raping four boys between 1960 and 1971.

Another former worker, John Richard Kerslake, committed suicide last November while awaiting a verdict on charges that he systematically abused five boys in the 1970s. A third, Captain David Osborne, was convicted of assault last year, but the jury could not reach a verdict on sexual assault charges.

Duncan Basheer Hannon lawyer Matt de Gregorio said the public hearing would “be an appropriate forum for light to be shone on the brutal practices “that had been common at Eden Park’’.

“It was a brutal regime of violence, often coupled with sexual assault of the many young boys who were living there,’’ he said.