AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Jared Owens
Reporter
Canberra
THE Marist Brothers repeatedly failed to remove pedophile teachers from classrooms, flying one self-confessed offender to north America where he subsequently worked as a Catholic school headmaster despite facing 24 charges of sexual abuse back in Australia, a royal commission has heard.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has turned its attention the Marist Brothers, examining the Catholic order’s failure to act on repeated warnings about brothers Gregory Sutton and John Chute, who are collectively suspected of molesting 69 children at numerous schools between 1960 and 1991.
The commission yesterday heard Sutton — who allegedly abused 21 children in Sydney, Canberra, Lismore and north Queensland between 1973 and 1987 — admitted pedophilia to the order’s then head, Alexis Turton, in 1989 after receiving a “tip off” from a local family that two teenage girls had reported him to police.
The girls, now middle-aged, told the commission Sutton molested them on countless occasions in private and in full view of their Year 5 class while sitting on his lap. They were forced to perform sex acts on him, and on each other.
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