AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Melissa Davey
Wednesday 25 November 2015
A former principal of a school in Victoria has said he received and passed on “hundreds” of complaints from parents and staff about the inappropriate behaviour towards children of a parish priest, Peter Searson.
But Graeme Sleeman, then the head of the Holy Family Parish school in Doveton, told the royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse on Wednesday that none of those complaints, made across two and a half years between 1984 and 1986, had been acted upon by senior parish staff, including the then archbishop Frank Little.
Complaints came in from parents daily, Sleeman told the commission in Melbourne. They ranged from concerns about Searson sexually abusing children to his bizarre way of running confession by having children sit on his lap. He passed all of them on to an educational consultant at the Catholic Education Office, Allan Dooley.
“I just couldn’t believe I could make so many complaints and see nothing happen, and be told on the other hand … I was running great programs at the school,” Sleeman told the commission.
“As soon as it came to issues with the parish priest, any credibility I seemed to have went out the window. No one wanted to listen to me. No one wanted to take any notice.”
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