MALTA/AUSTRALIA
Malta Today
Matthew Vella 29 April 2014
Echoes of the violent world of child migrants, amongst them Maltese emigrants, entrusted to the Christian Brothers back in the 1960s are reverberating inside Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The evidence makes for harrowing reading, as a survey of the Australian press shows.
A child migrant identified as ‘VG’ who says he had been raised “in a loving and close family in Malta”, told the commission that reporting violent sexual assaults to priests in confessions only led to more brutal beatings and punishment at the Christian Brothers’ home of St Mary’s Agricultural School in Tardun, a small town in Western Australia.
VG was reported to have revealed “painful details of repeated assaults, neglect and cruelty” during the second day of the commission’s public hearing into the experiences of boys at four Christian Brothers orphanages.
VG was testifying with his wife at his side for support.
After the death of his father, he was told he would be going on an “adventure” when he was sent to Western Australia.
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