AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 21 May 2015)
A Christian Brother, Peter John Toomey, had a habit of indecently assaulting students at a Melbourne Catholic secondary school in the presence of other students, a court has been told. Toomey also taught in other schools including in Ballarat, in regional Victoria. In May 2015, Brother Toomey was mentioned by a Ballarat victim at a public hearing of Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission 2015.
Peter Toomey joined the Victoria-Tasmania province of the Christian Brothers order (the St Patrick’s province) about 1967, when he was aged 18. In 1972, aged 23, he was teaching a variety of subjects in Years 7 and 8 at Trinity Regional College in Brunswick, in Melbourne’s inner north.
In 1998, an ex-student of this school (“Boris”, born in 1960) was having a personal crisis at the age of 38. In discussions with his parents, he revealed how he had been sexually abused by Brother Toomey at the Brunswick school in 1972-3, when he was aged 12. Boris’s father then phoned Broken Rites, asking how to obtain justice. Broken Rites explained that this was a matter for the Victoria Police Sexual Offences and Child-abuse Investigation Team (SOCIT). Broken Rites provided the phone number of the SOCIT unit.
Boris told the SOCIT unit that he was not Toomey’s only victim. Police managed to locate ten of Toomey’s former students, who provided written statements. These were not necessarily Toomey’s only victims — they were merely those who were interviewed by police. The case was investigated by Detective Tony Mousa of the Brunswick Criminal Investigation Unit, Melbourne.
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