AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
February 26, 2015
Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter
When a masked man entered a boarding house at Knox Grammar School and sexually assaulted a year 8 student in his bed, the then housemaster Timothy Hawkes fully expected the police to be notified.
Dr Hawkes, now headmaster of the Kings School, told a royal commission that he never saw police at the school and, to his knowledge, the victim and witnesses were never interviewed.
He said he did not see it as his responsibility to report the matter to the police, instead leaving it in the hands of the then headmaster, Dr Ian Paterson.
“I was comfortable with the fact we had a highly experienced headmaster,” he said.
“I had every confidence that proper protocols would have been followed. I was not aware of what those particular protocols would have been.”
Under cross-examination by counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Dr Hawkes said he was unaware of mandatory reporting laws regarding child sexual abuse at the time of the so-called “balaclava man” incident in late 1988.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.