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Abuse ...
By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Abuse at the north shore presbyterian school, which one student described as a ‘paedophile ring’ went on for 33 years, the Royal Commission heard today. STUDENTS at the prestigious Knox Grammar School were given alcohol and cigarettes before a number of house masters showed them sickening pornographic videos depicting paedophiles and bestiality, it has been revealed at the child sex abuse royal commission. One former student, who was in a sexual relationship with a resident housemaster for three years, described the school as “a paedophile ring”. One teacher, who allegedly wore a balaclava while sneaking under a boy’s bed one night to abuse him, will be among the witnesses giving evidence. The abuse at the north shore presbyterian school went on for 33 years from 1970 to 2003 but the school has been accused of covering it up and destroying internal reports, including files of students who made complaints, which went missing. “This hearing will examine how and why these and other critical documents have gone missing,” counsel assisting the commission, David Lloyd, said today. “Whether they were deliberately destroyed in order to eliminate evidence which might adversely affect the school and who from the school might have been involved in and or aware of any deliberate destruction of relevant documentary documents.” None of the abuse was ever reported to the police by the school and one abuser was even given a glowing reference to get another job as a teacher. The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has begun a two-week hearing into how the school dealt with the abuse which was publicly revealed in 2009 when a number of former students went to the police. Five teachers were convicted of sexually assaulting the schoolboys including Barrie Stewart, Adrian Nisbett, Craig Treloar, Roger James and Damien Vance. Another three teachers were never criminally charged, the commission was told. The boys were abused in the playground, the storeroom, at music rehearsal, on camping trips and in their own beds, the commission heard. One of the boys was 14 and in one of the boarding houses, MacNeil House, when he woke early one morning in 1988 to find a man dressed in a Knox tracksuit and wearing a balaclava sexually assaulting him in his bed. When the boy raised the alarm, the balaclava man grabbed the boy’s doona, put it over his head and fled with a number of boys chasing him. The boys claimed it was one of the resident masters in MacNeil House at the time, Christopher Fotis, Mr Lloyd said. “The offender had the same build as Mr Fotis and Mr Fotis had, before lights out on the evening before the assault, said to (the boy) that he had a surprise in store for him that night,” Mr Lloyd said. The school did not call the police even to report a break and enter at the school and Mr Fotis continued to teach classes including religious education until he resigned from the school after being arrested for masturbating in his car while parked outside the school, the commission was told. Mr Fotis is expected to give evidence. “In the wake of the incident (the boy) was moved to a bed next to a Year 9 student who was thought to be the toughest 15-year-old in the house,” Mr Lloyd said. Craig Treloar, who taught at Knox between 1982 and 2009, was suspended from the school for only six months and the police never called at the time despite allegedly admitting in 1987 to the then-headmaster Dr Ian Paterson that he had been showing boys explicit pornography depicting bestiality and paedophilia and that he had been physically abusing children in his room. Treloar remained at the school until he was arrested in 2009 and went on to be convicted of indecently assaulting four boys. The hearing continues in Sydney.
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