AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph
Royal commission into child sex abuse: pastor said it would be ‘normal to have girls sitting on knee’ of teacher
JANET FIFE-YEOMANS THE DAILY TELEGRAPH OCTOBER 13, 2014
A CHURCH pastor who investigated allegations of sexual assault by a teacher said that having young girls sitting on their knee in class “would be quite normal in a teaching situation”, the child sex abuse royal commission has been told.
Three girls who reported the abuse in 1987 at Melbourne’s Northside Christian College were given a “firm lecture.”
The teacher, Kenneth Sandilands, 69, went on to plead guilty and was jailed for two years in 2000 for 13 counts of indecent assaulting eight victims at the college, which is run by Encompass Church, a member of the Australian Christian Churches which was formerly known as the Assemblies of God.
Last month, Sandilands, who retired in 1992 because he was going blind, was sentenced to a further 26 months in jail for abusing children at St Paul’s Anglican Primary School in Frankston between 1970 and 1974.
The commission has been told that there will be evidence that over the 10 years that Mr Sandilands taught at Northside Christian College between 1983 and 1992, there were allegations that he had sexually abused about 30 children.
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