AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
May 19, 2015
Konrad Marshall
Senior writer
From the witness box Philip Nagel held the black-and-white picture aloft – his grade-four photo from St Alipius Primary School in 1974.
There were rows of boys in uniform, the taller ones smiling and standing up the back, the little ones seated and cross-legged at the front.
They should all be middle-aged by now, like Philip Nagel, 50. But instead, a third of the boys in the image are dead, believed by suicide.
Mr Nagel, the first person called in Ballarat on Tuesday at the opening of the Royal Commission on Institutional Child Sex Abuse, knows why.
He remembers how it started, watching the Christian Brothers at the school playing “catch and kiss” with the younger boys.
He remembers how it escalated into clumsy and confusing, degrading and demeaning sexual abuse in the sick bay.
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