Sex Abuse Victims Struggle for Justice in Brisbane's Web of Powerful Interests
By Joshua Robertson
It may be stained by the legacy of perhaps the most prolific child sex offender in the history of Queensland schools, but the state’s most prestigious old school tie still commands a hefty price. A year at Brisbane Grammar costs about $25,000, 30% of the average full-time worker’s pre-tax salary. A few thousand dollars less buys a year at St Paul’s, the other elite Brisbane private school to come under the microscope in hearings this month by the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. Grammar in particular retains a reputation as the state’s top school, with an alumni that peppers the top ranks of the local establishment. This is no solace to the family of one victim of the school’s first student counsellor, Kevin Lynch, whose abuse of the boy was so severe he suffered an organic brain injury. The school gave the former student an out-of-court compensation payout of $45,000, which would not cover two years at Grammar today. His mother told the commission: “We wanted only the best for our children. What did we get for our money? We got the worst anyone could possibly imagine.” Still, Grammar’s links to leading legal figures were on show during commission hearings in Brisbane, as were the complications this posed for former students seeking redress. One victim spoke of approaching a veteran criminal solicitor to pursue his case, only to find his phone calls unanswered and that the lawyer had been the chairman of Grammar’s board of governors at the time the abuse occurred. The solicitor did not give evidence at the commission. Another victim noted the lower school headmaster who first sent him for counselling sessions with his abuser was now a judge. The judge did not give evidence. “I just wonder where his judgment was back then,” he told the commission. The second victim was furious to discover that the barrister whom he had paid a decade earlier for legal advice on his abuse claim was representing the school in the Brisbane hearings. The barrister excused himself from questioning the victim. The victim suggested in the hearing it was the legal expertise of Howard Stack, a former partner at one of Australia’s most prestigious law firms, that prompted the school to appoint Stack to head its board in the wake of abuse revelations in 1991. It did not take a royal commission to reveal the abuse of as many as 100 boys by Lynch through most of the 1970s and 80s. Nor the abuse at St Paul’s by the same man through the 1990s – an echo of earlier crimes by a music teacher, Gregory Robert Knight, whom the Anglican school allowed to quietly resign, enabling a continued run of impunity across three states. The unlikely trigger for revelations of Lynch’s serial abuse came 15 years earlier with the death of one of the counsellor’s victims, Nigel Parodi, who shot three police then himself in Brisbane in 2000. A flood of compensation claims followed. But the commission hearings gave the first public platform for many victims to detail the horror of what unfolded in Lynch’s locked, soundproof office – the one students could only enter when they saw a light turn green. The most disturbing accounts described sadistic sexual abuse by Lynch – face slappings, insertion of acupuncture needles into a student’s penis, underpants bloodied by anal penetration, coercion into sexual acts under hypnosis and the guise of “therapy” to “harness the power” of a teen’s orgasms to boost academic and sporting performance. Victims who often lived at the margins of a stoic school culture in which rugby and rowing were king described how Lynch insinuated himself as a father figure in their lives. His counselling sessions were undocumented and subject to no external assessment by the school. The commission heard witness accounts of complaints about abuse by Lynch going directly to various Grammar staff, including the then headmaster Maxwell Howell. Howell, like Lynch, is now dead but repeatedly denied any knowledge of alleged abuse before his death. A series of senior Grammar figures who took the stand at the commission either denied outright or said they could not recall being told of Lynch’s abuse or inappropriate relationships with students. At Grammar, as at St Paul’s, there was no formal reporting system for complaints of sexual abuse. The school’s barrister repeatedly disputed witness accounts that they told Howell about the abuse. But the apparent credibility and consistency in detail of some accounts only fuelled suspicions among Lynch victims of a cover-up, a feat of wilful blindness, to preserve the school’s formidable reputation – the very thing, in the words of one victim, it “traded on”. Through it all, Grammar’s response remained a model of modern corporate crisis management. Its core position is not a moral but a legal one: it denies liability. It did not deny the fact of Lynch’s abuse. But it maintains it was not responsible because the hierarchy did not know. Stack, who remains the head of the Grammar school board, broke down in the witness box when describing the moral dilemma of negotiating settlements with some 65 Lynch victims in 2002. Stack said he personally believed victims and admitted that the credibility of Howell’s denials was now “not looking good”. But the school board had “no option” but to deny legal responsibility, he said. “I was between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “If the school was going to get indemnity, we could not admit legal liability. When all this happened, I came out so fast and admitted moral responsibility. I could do no more.” The school’s insurer had threatened to leave the school to pay all claims itself because of evidence Howell knew of abuse claims. In the end it insisted the school shoulder some of the costs for that reason. It was a former Grammar colleague, Gilbert Case, who hired Lynch after he left Grammar to work at St Paul’s, where he abused children using the same modus operandi, including the lighting entry system to his office. Case denied any knowledge that his former friend was a “wholesale paedophile” but with a striking caveat – that at the time he was headmaster at St Paul’s he would not have considered a teacher fondling a boy’s genitals a crime. Like the Grammar headmasters, Case rejected accounts from students and parents that they complained to him of abuse by Lynch. Case said he initially considered the complaint that led to Lynch being charged with sexual assault of a former St Paul’s student as “vexatious and vindictive”. The Anglican church put some symbolic daylight between itself and Grammar in one respect of its response to the commission hearings. Archbishop Phillip Aspinall has signalled the church will refund considerable fees paid to St Paul’s by victims of abuse by Lynch and Knight. But Aspinall indicated to the commission that the church, even when it was willing to take a less combative tack with victims in legal proceedings, had scarcely any more opportunity to do so while “trapped” by the terms of their insurance contracts. This led to the “bizarre” scenario where he was lobbying state governments to abandon the statute of limitations on legal claims – which ruled out most abuse victims who were usually in middle age by the time they were ready for their day in court – at the same time that the church’s insurer was using the time-limit defence against former St Paul’s students. Grammar victims were told by lawyers the same time-limit defence would probably allow the school to defeat their claims in court. Aspinall said there was an inherent conflict when insurers with commercial interests acted for a school or a church that wished to “express care and concern for the survivor without voiding its insurance cover”. Worse still, he saw no way “that conflict can be resolved”. This means that churches and schools, regardless of any willingness to own up to their failures, remain captive to commercial imperatives that turn the handling of historical sexual abuse complaints into a Kafka-esque, if not grotesque, spectacle.
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