AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
June 20, 2014
The Canberra Times
The harrowing ultra-marathon that is the royal commission on institutional responses to child sexual abuse left Canberra on Thursday after public hearings centred almost entirely on abuses by two former teachers, and how their employer, the Marist Brothers religious order, responded to the allegations surrounding their activities.
So egregious were these abuses, and so transparently lacking the Marist Brothers’ response, that they have become almost a byword for institutional abuse in religious schools in NSW, Queensland and Canberra. Indeed, the Catholic Archbishop of Goulburn and Canberra, Christopher Prowse, wrote to parishioners before the two weeks of proceedings began to prepare them for the “public testimonies of the very sad experiences of some victims’’.
The crimes of John William Chute, also known as Brother Kostka, are familiar to many Canberrans. Chute was jailed in 2008 after pleading guilty to a string of offences committed when he was a teacher at Marist College in Pearce, between 1985 and 1989. Seven charges dating from before then – Chute’s teaching career spanned 1952-93 and included stints at 12 Marist Brothers schools in NSW – had to be dropped because of statute of limitations issues.
The identity of the other Marist teacher – which had been the subject of an 18-year-old suppression order after his conviction and jailing in 1996 on multiple child sexual abuse charges – was revealed at the royal commission last week as Brother Gregory Sutton. Like Chute, Sutton taught at a number of schools throughout NSW before coming to Canberra, leaving behind him a trail of victims. Many have never overcome their psychological trauma, as they detailed to the hearing.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.