AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS AND CAMERON PHELPS FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
An Anglican home for boys in the Hunter region of NSW was used by a paedophile ring headed by a senior clergyman to access and sexually abuse children.
On Tuesday the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse opened a two-week hearing into what the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle did to stop priest Peter Rushton and a pedophile network of clergy and laypeople who preyed on children for decades.
Victim Paul Gray gave evidence and said he was taken to St Albans School for Boys in the Hunter Valley in the 1960s, where there was a locked room called the ‘f***ing room’ where boys would be forced to have group oral and anal sex with adult men.
Mr Gray broke down in the witness stand when he told how he was repeatedly raped by a gang of men at the boys home.
Mr Gray wept as he recalled 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 Mr Gray to St Alban’s Boys Home where he was locked in a room and a number of men would rape or have oral sex with him, the commission was told.
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