AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
June 16, 2016
Angela Thompson
Boys at Wollongong’s Edmund Rice College in the 1980s knew sexual predators moved freely among them, and would share advice about who to avoid being alone with, Throsby MP Stephen Jones — a former school captain — has revealed.
Following another teacher’s admission of guilt over historic child sex crimes at the West Wollongong all-boys college, Mr Jones said the school had felt like a “dumping ground” for paedophiles whose crimes were overlooked by those who could have ended the abuse.
“There was a whole bunch of them [paedophiles] at the time I was there,” said Mr Jones, who graduated from the school in 1983.
“Boys would [avoid them] in all sorts of ways. We would just talk amongst ourselves about it — ‘don’t get caught with this person or that person’.”
Brother John Vincent Roberts was allowed to teach at the school despite at least one prior complaint of abuse at another NSW Christian Brothers School.
In Wollongong Local Court on Wednesday, Roberts, 73, admitted to 11 charges relating to the sexual abuse of a young male student at Edmund Rice in the late 1980s.
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