AUSTRALIA
BBC News
By Marie McInerney
Melbourne, Victoria
For decades, Peter Blenkiron remained silent about the abuse he had suffered at age 11 at the hands of his Catholic Christian Brother teacher.
Earlier this year, Mr Blenkiron relived the horror of his school days, telling an inquiry into child abuse about how he would be pressed against the wall at the back of the classroom while his teacher physically and sexually abused him, with the other students ordered to look away.
“If there was no sexual abuse after the belting, then you knew you’d had a good day,” the 53-year-old told a hearing of Australia’s landmark Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Giving testimony from his hometown Ballarat, in regional Victoria, and hearing harrowing stories from other survivors of child abuse brought back the pain, Mr Blenkiron told the BBC.
“I was a mess for about two months,” he says.
But he was determined to shine a light on the abuse that has claimed the lives of many of his peers, through suicide and substance abuse, and that turned him into “a ticking time bomb”.
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