AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 1 November 2014)
This court case is an example of how it is possible for victims of church child-abuse to get their perpetrator convicted many years after the abuse. In the 1970s, Marist Brother John Skehan had multiple victims in Catholic schools in New South Wales and Victoria. Forty years later, one victim got Brother Skehan convicted in a New South Wales court in 2010 and another victim scored a similar victory over Skehan (aged 75) in a Victorian court in 2014.
Brother Skehan’s convictions were for offences committed while he worked at Marist Brothers schools in Broken Hill (NSW) and Shepparton (Victoria) but (according to Marist publications) he also worked at other Marist schools, including (in the 1980s) Marcellin College in Bulleen, Melbourne.
John Skehan (born in 1939) became a trainee Brother in his late teens in the 1950s at the Marist Brothers’ training institution in an old mansion, “Drusilla”, at Macedon, north-west of Melbourne. In those years, a new Marist Brother would adopt a “religious” name. Broken Rites has seen a photo of a group of Marist Brothers in 1959, one of whom is listed as “Brother Emilian (John Skehan)”, presumably named after a famous Saint Emelian. In later years, many of the Brothers changed back to their birth name. Skehan’s victims in the 1970s knew him as “Brother John”.
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