AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated on 16 October 2013)
This Broken Rites article tells how the Catholic Church harboured Father David Edwin Rapson for two decades, while he endangered children in Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales.
David Edwin Rapson (born 30 July 1953) was recruited in the early 1970s as a trainee Catholic priest in Melbourne in a Catholic religious order, called the Salesians of Don Bosco. From Day One, he (and certain colleagues of his) put schoolboys at risk.
At various times in the 1970s and 1980s, Rapson worked at Salesian College (then known as “Rupertswood”), a boarding school in Sunbury (north-east of Melbourne), where he had easy access to boarders. During that same time-span, he also had easy access to boys during stints at other Salesian schools, including one school in Tasmania and one in New South Wales.
According to evidence in court in 2013, Father Rapson used his authority over the boys (as young as twelve), enticing them to his office with the invitation to play computer games, drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes before sexally abusing them. However, if boys complained about Rapson, they tended to merely tell Rapson’s colleagues and friends in the priesthood, some of whom might be offenders themselves. And the church does not arrest any priests – only the police do this.
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