AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX AND RICK MORTON THE AUSTRALIAN FEBRUARY 08, 2014
AS a young man living in southern Sydney during 1974, Peter Farthing and his family would regularly welcome a boy from the nearby Salvation Army home to lunch on Sunday afternoons. They would share lunch and watch television together. “It was an experience for him to escape the home,” Farthing said.
It was only decades later, as personnel officer for the Salvation Army, that the now Major Farthing began to learn just how much that boy needed to escape.
Over the past fortnight, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard that boys at Bexley were raped and beaten until they bled under the sadistic rule of the home’s manager, Captain Lawrence Wilson.
Amid some of the most distressing evidence yet uncovered by the commission, experts believe the current crisis may be unprecedented in the international history of the Salvation Army. Many have also been surprised it is the Salvation Army, a widely trusted charitable organisation, that has been so exposed, rather than one of the established churches widely expected to be the focus of the commission’s work.
Evidence of brutally degrading treatment has been uncovered by the commission at four Salvation Army homes in Queensland and NSW.
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