AUSTRALIA
news.com.au
SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
By Rebekah Ison
Australian Associated Press
When a senior Marist Brother emailed a lawyer about complaints of child sexual abuse in 2001, he started the message with a tagline from Jaws 2.
“As the famous movie line said: just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…!,” Brother Michael Hill said in an email shown to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Wednesday.
“After a fairly mild couple of months all hell has broken loose over the past couple of weeks on the abuse front.”
The message from Brother Hill, who was the then-provincial for parts of the country’s east, was sent after a Brisbane student made a complaint about a man known as Brother Patrick touching his groin.
A public hearing has heard boys were groped in classrooms, abused in the chapel and raped in an office of the Newcastle Marist Brothers High School where Brother Patrick taught alongside fellow pedophiles Brother Romuald and Brother Dominic in the 1970s.
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.