AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 5 September 2015)
For years, the Catholic Church has been harbouring a prominent Australian priest, Father Julian Fox, who indecently assaulted vulnerable schoolboys on their naked bottoms. The boys, silenced by the holy image of the priesthood, later found that their lives were damaged by this priestly breach of trust. Some of them, in adulthood, eventually contacted the police but the church authorities transferred Father Fox overseas, out of the reach of the Australian police. The police finally got Fox back to Australia, where they charged him with multiple incidents of buggery and indecent assault committed at two Melbourne schools between 1976 and 1985. In Melbourne in 2015 Fox was sentenced to jail for the indecent assaults but his defence lawyer told the court that, despite now being a convicted criminal, Father Fox is still officially a Catholic priest and still has the support of of the church authorities.
Father Julian Benedict Fox (born 20 July 1945) has spent his whole priestly career as a member of a Catholic religious order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, which conducted boys’ schools around Australia. He rose to become a vice-principal and a principal of two Melbourne schools, where (according to court evidence) he was in charge of punishing boys for such misdemeanours as “a football hitting a window, throwing rubbish, running in hallways” or “boys talking in the boarders’ dormitory after lights-out”. During these punishments, Father Fox committed his sexual assaults.
Regarding the crimes for which he was jailed, the court was told that:
* In punishing a boy in his office, Father Fox would make the boy lean over a desk or chair, to have his bottom thrashed.
* Fox’s “weapon of choice” was a shortened pool cue (a rod used for hitting balls on a billiard table). He would whack the rod against (or, in some cases, up) a boy’s bare bottom, causing intense pain (and perhaps bleeding) in the anus, perhaps resulting later in blood over the boy’s pyjamas and bed-sheets.
* Sometimes, Fox would insert his finger, painfully, into a boy’s anus.
* Police originally alleged that, in some instances, Fox inserted his penis into a boy’s bottom, although eventually Fox was convicted of indecent assault, instead of the more serious crime of buggery.
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