AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Australian Associated Press
Tuesday 2 August 2016
Paul Gray broke down in the witness stand at a royal commission hearing when he told how he was repeatedly raped by a gang of men at a boys’ home run by the Anglican church in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.
Gray wept as he recalled on Tuesday how his godfather, Father Peter Rushton, who was a priest at Cessnock, had anally raped him when he was just 10.
In the mid-1960s Rushton began taking Gray to St Alban’s Home for Boys where he was locked in a room and a number of men would rape or have oral sex with him, the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse was told.
Gray told how Rushton would cut his back with a knife and smear the blood on his body, “symbolic of the blood of Christ”.
He was taken to St Alban’s regularly by Rushton for 18 months. He recalled how once a number of boys were made to lie on beds and six or eight men would choose a boy and take him to a separate room.
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