AUSTRALIA
The Courier-Mail
Michael Madigan, The Courier-Mail
November 4, 2016
CHILD rapes, ritual humiliations, sadism and physical violence – Queensland’s known history of child abuse reaches back almost a century, impacting on every demographic and leaving thousands of people emotionally crippled, incapable of conducting a normal life.
Today’s revelation of the number of convicted pedophiles employed between 1947 and 2010 at one of Queensland’s most prestigious schools, the Anglican Church Grammar School, popularly known as “Churchie” is yet another hideous chapter in a story of misery and betrayal.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the terms of reference for which were established nearly four years ago on January 11, 2013, has played a pivotal role in uncovering hundreds of ugly stories of child abuse which may have remained untold and in reminding us of other cases.
In Queensland, we were reminded of the horrors perpetrated by Toowoomba Catholic primary schoolteacher Gerard Vincent Byrnes – the school’s “child protection officer’’ who, in 2010, pleaded guilty to 44 child sex offences involving young girls, including rape, between 2007 and 2008.
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