AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
AAP
It’s the rollcall of names that decades on still haunts former St Alipius students: Ridsdale, Best, Dowlan, Fitzgerald, Farrell.
The school chaplain, principal and the entire teaching staff.
Five confirmed pedophiles, all at the Christian Brothers junior school in Ballarat East in the 1970s.
A St Alipius class photo from the time bears testament to the devastating toll their abuse wrought.
“Now a third of those are gone, they’re dead,” Ballarat Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA) manager Shireen Gunn said.
The unusually high level of suicides and premature deaths is the ongoing legacy of the abuse of children as young as five in the Ballarat diocese.
Peter Blenkiron, who was 11 when he was abused at the Brothers’ other school in Ballarat, St Patrick’s College, estimates there’s been 10 suicides in the regional Victorian city in the past year alone.
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