Do Dead Kids Matter ? - Crimes by Church and State Against Kids

by fulltimestudent 4 Replies latest watchtower child-abuse

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  fulltimestudent

  The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State.

  Never heard of this organisation before. Is it for real, I wonder? But I do know that it seems true that some terrible crimes against children have been committed, without retribution.

  For example, there is the Salvation Army Home for Boys at Bayswater, in Victoria, Australia.

  From the Melbourne Newspaper, The Age.

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  Paedophile ring 'lent out boys'

  Date: December 18, 2012

  Barney Zwartz

  BAYSWATER Boys' Home was a paedophiles' paradise, with several unexplained deaths and missing boys, and others lent to outside paedophiles, a leading abuse lawyer said on Monday.

  Angela Sdrinis - whose firm has represented more than 1000 wards of state, including 137 from Bayswater - said systemic abuse by Salvation Army staff was so severe that in some cases boys were killed or allowed to die from their injuries.

  ''I believe that children may well have been killed or at least allowed to die. Children as young as eight were allowed to abscond, with no efforts made to find them or report to the police,'' Ms Sdrinis said.

  ''Many of these children would have had no family and no one to take an interest in their existence. Society regarded these children as worthless, and these attitudes were mirrored by police.'' The deaths of such children may well not have been investigated, she said.

  In other testimony, boys from Victorian orphanages later sent to prison said that was not nearly as bad as the boys' homes, according to the Care Leavers Australia Network.

  It was another litany of horror at the inquiry as CLAN told of repeated and systematic rapes over years in many orphanages, physical and psychological abuse amounting to torture, and a callous indifference by police and authorities, whether church or state.

  CLAN chief executive Leonie Sheedy said a sample of 18 years showed that 1352 children absconded from religious and non-government homes and 1877 fled state institutions.

  ''A great number were running way from child rape, and sexual and other criminal assaults. What did the police do? They simply returned them to their abusers. They did not ask why the children were running away or inquire into their wellbeing,'' Ms Sheedy said.

  ''The boys who ran away from homes and ended up in prison have told me over and over again that prison was much better than the boys' homes.''

  Ms Sdrinis said the police searched the former Bayswater Boys' Home in 2009, but no charges were laid. One victim, Rod Braybon, told police in 2009 of reports of two wards of state who died of beatings in the 1950s and were allegedly buried in the Sugarloaf Hill area of the home, while three other boys disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

  Ms Sdrinis said there was compelling evidence of the rape of many victims by serial abusers who were allowed to molest children for more than 20 years. ''In the 1970s the Bayswater Boys' Home was staffed by a paedophile ring, and staff not only sexually abused the children in their care but also allowed other paedophiles free access to boys, who were removed from the home and sexually abused at will.''

  One such was John Bayer, who was jailed for nine years in 2008 for abusing 12 victims, five of them from the Bayswater home. In 2006, the Salvation Army secretly paid more than $1.5 million in compensation to more than 50 victims who were beaten, raped and tortured from the 1950s to 1970s by Salvation Army officers at the Bayswater home, Box Hill Boys' Home and East Kew Girls' Home, all now closed.

  CLAN spokesman Frank Golding said the processes of dealing with child abuse had ''not improved at all'' in the past 100 years.

  He said the responses of institutions over thousands of cases followed a similar pattern. This was disbelief (''you can't take the word of a child over the word of an adult''), denial, blaming the victim (''the girl was wicked and used her seductive charms against the priest'') and blaming the parents (''the children come from immoral families, what else could you expect?'').

  Law Institute of Victoria president Michael Holcroft told the inquiry that under present Victorian law, there was no obligation to report suspicions of child abuse to police. The mandatory reporting required of some professionals was to the Department of Human Services.

  He said failure to report reasonable suspicion to police should be a separate offence under the Crimes Act.

  Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/paedophile-ring-lent-out-boys-20121217-2bjej.html#ixzz2FKxJpc5a
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  fulltimestudent

  And this report is from a separate inquiry to the Melbourne (Victorian Inquiry). It appeared in the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD a few days ago.

  It is a matter of record that extreme physical violence is often the experience of children in many Aboriginal communities.

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  Sydney Morning Herald

  Sex abuse of Aboriginal children shown to be just as bad as ever

  Date: February 1, 2013

  Anna Patty

  State Political Reporter

  NSW Ombudsman Bruce Barbour has warned the state against simply pouring more money into programs.

  A STRATEGY to tackle child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities has failed despite the investment of tens of millions in taxpayer dollars over five years to address the problem, a scathing report by the NSW Ombudsman has found.

  The assessment of 12 Aboriginal communities in NSW found the former Labor government's approach to addressing child sex abuse had done little to help reduce the number of reported incidents. Aboriginal children were still dramatically over-represented as victims of child sex abuse.

  And the Ombudsman, Bruce Barbour, has warned the state government against simply pouring more money into programs without a proper evaluation of their effectiveness. His 93 recommendations include better monitoring and accountability of services.

  In 2011, more than half the 8857 victims of sexual abuse in NSW were children under the age of 16. Aboriginal children represented 10 per cent of all child abuse victims, despite making up just 4 per cent of the child population.

  Nearly a quarter of sex abuse reports between 2007 and 2011 in the 12 communities the Ombudsman studied involved Aboriginal children - but they represented just 12 per cent of those populations.

  Aborigines were also over-represented as suspects and were accused over 70 per cent of incidents.

  Almost all the children who had been abused were known to Community Services. Two-thirds had been the subject of 10 or more child at risk reports before the incident occurred.

  While state government figures suggest 55 per cent of all reports of NSW children at risk made to Community Services received a thorough face-to-face assessment, the Ombudsman found only 26 per cent of reports were assessed in the 12 communities his office examined.

  About $60 million was earmarked for a range of strategies launched in 2007 including the $22.9 million Safe Families program in five Aboriginal communities in western NSW. However, it had helped raise awareness of the problem and the need for families to report assaults. ''This program raised high expectations, but fell well short on delivery,'' the Ombudsman said.

  A $5 million initiative to solve the problem of child assault victims needing to travel up to four hours to see a paediatrician had also delivered an ''inadequate return on this investment and children are still being required to travel unacceptable distances''.

  The Ombudsman said his office has been highlighting the need for agencies with a shared role in child protection to identify and respond to at-risk children and young people.

  ''Yet many of the early intervention and 'integrated' case management programs operating in high-need communities are failing to reach those who need them most,'' he said.

  The Ombudsman said the O'Farrell government's establishment of the Ministerial Taskforce on Aboriginal Affairs in 2011 and its recent commitments to forming genuine partnerships with Aboriginal leaders and its education initiatives, ''provides considerable scope to achieve real and lasting change''.

  The NSW Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Victor Dominello, said the state government welcomed the Ombudsman's 93 recommendations.

  "The comprehensive report acknowledges the failures of the past including poorly integrated services, chronic staffing shortages and poor accountability," Mr Dominello said.

  Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sex-abuse-of-aboriginal-children-shown-to-be-just-as-bad-as-ever-20130131-2dnls.html#ixzz2Jcwu0B3z
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  fulltimestudent

  The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State website claims its Head Office is in London,

  It claims its goals are:

  1. To bring to trial those persons and institutions responsible for the exploitation, torture and murder of children, past and present, and

  2. To stop these and other criminal actions by church and state.

  Here's an extract from one web-page: ( http://itccs.org/2013/01/11/why-dead-children-dont-matter-and-how-they-can-what-billie-combes-and-moloch-still-teach-us/ )

  As in life, so in death. Billie never forgot the children. Whenever he stumbled into the studio of my radio program in Vancouver, he'd break down on the air and sob about the horror he refused to let go of: the memory of watching children be slowly tortured and killed, and then buried in secret by catholic priests at the Kamloops and Mission "Indian residential schools" during the mid 1960's.

  "They stretched one little girl on that rack and raped her until she died. I heard her scream and scream for help, I'll never forget her screams. She got buried with the rest of them at Kamloops, in the orchard. I saw Brother Murphy dump a bunch of those little stiff bodies into the same hole one night."

  Billie Combes was a conduit for the screams of those lost and betrayed kids, like any prophet is, crying out the only note he could to a deaf and blind world. His refusal to do what a guilty society orders and requires, and "have closure and move on" kept the crime alive.

  That made Billie a risk to those responsible, and so it led to his own murder by lethal injection, on February 27, 2011, in St. Paul's catholic hospital in Vancouver.

  Maybe my failure to save Billie causes me to still dream about him. I know that my sleepless nights come, too, from my own refusal to "heal" and allow those mass graves to become snugly out of mind. But the bigger truth is that my friend's appearance last night was meant for more than me.

  Consider ourselves.

  How easily hundreds of us will flock to protests about abstractions like aboriginal treaty rights, but never demand with equal passion the return of those small bones, and the prosecution of their churchly killers.

  And how is it that not a single aboriginal "leader" will do what tradition and justice demands, and honor the dead by opening up the soil over the mass graves of their own relatives, killed by church and state?

  Why am I alone in this active concern? Where is the "grassroots movement" to hold a Nuremberg Tribunal for Canada's War Crimes?

  And why, o why, do the survivors of Canada's Holocaust continue to beg for morsels or acceptance from the Church Psychopaths who sodomized and sterilized and electrocuted little boys and girls for pleasure, or profit?

  Does it matter to you? Do you too hear the screams that never stop?
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  fulltimestudent

  Another witness, testifying at the Victorian inquiry into clergy sex abuse, claimed that many young inmates had been beaten to death and buried in unmarked graves.

  As an aside I'm told by another XJW that the son of a one-time Australian circuit overseer was once incarcerated at the Salvation Army Boys Home at Bayswater, Victoria and was probably raped, if not by staff, then by other inmates.

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  Search boys' homes for corpses: ex-ward

  Date: February 5, 2013

  WAToday

  Barney Zwartz

  POLICE should revisit the grounds of Salvation Army orphanages with ground-thermal imaging and cadaver dogs to look for corpses of boys beaten to death, a former ward of state told the Victorian inquiry into clergy sex abuse on Monday.

  Police should also check Department of Human Services records of children in the homes to see how many had no later records of driving licences, bank accounts, tax returns, or medical and voting records but had disappeared without trace, Brian Cherrie told the inquiry.

  ''The DHS holds the records for all state wards. They would know how many children vanished from institutions because they would simply not have signed off from their wardships.'' But many of these records had been destroyed, or left in rat-infested and flood-prone warehouses, according to a scathing Ombudsman's report, he said.

  Mr Cherrie also attacked government reluctance to inquire into child sex abuse for decades, calling it ''almost a conspiracy to hide the truth''. He said it was a ploy by the government to exclude state institutions from the parliamentary inquiry, which considers only church and non-government institutions.

  Several former wards of state have said boys died at Salvation Army homes from beatings. Mr Cherrie said some children ''were beaten that bad that they were dragged away and not seen again''. Another ward told him of finding a skeleton in a cave used to store flower bulbs.

  Police did carry out an investigation in 2009 and no charges were laid.

  He said he was anally raped regularly by a staff member over two years at the Salvation Army in Box Hill while aged 10 and 11, and later found two other former wards who had been abused decades earlier. ''I have ... carried this shameful guilt for 50 years, and I refuse to accept blame for it any longer. And I refuse to hide what happened to me.''

  Hugh McGowan, a child migrant from Scotland in 1961, told the inquiry he was sexually abused by a former superintendent of the Presbyterian-run Dhurringile Rural Training Farm in Tatura. It was ''a terrifying experience'' that he still felt uncomfortable thinking about nearly 50 years later.

  Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/national/search-boys-homes-for-corpses-exward-20130204-2duja.html#ixzz2JylgdbmE

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  Where was Jesus when all these things happened. These crimes occurred in premises dedicated to Jesus, but he ignores the cries of the children,
• 

  fulltimestudent

  Torment and Abuse for boys in a Catholic School - Where was Jesus? Sleeping , maybe or just dead?

  Another tale of horror from the Victorian Inquiry into Child Abuse, as p;ublished in the Sydney Morning Herald

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  The hell house

  Date: January 13, 2013

  Mark Russell and Jared Lynch

  This country mansion seemingly offered an idyllic setting to educate Catholic boys, but behind closed doors, Rupertswood was anything but peaceful.

  AT THE end of a winding road overlooking Sunbury is Rupertswood, an ornate 1874 mansion that today serves as a boutique hotel. But the grand residence, where butlers and doormen wait on guests paying up to $500 a night, was for decades a house of horror.

  It is alleged that from 1960 to 1990, when Rupertswood was a Catholic boarding and day school, Salesian brothers, including two former school principals and a boarding master, routinely abused boys in their care.

  Over the past decade, four brothers have been convicted separately of multiple counts of indecent assault, while another will face trial in August. Two other alleged offenders have left the country.

  The story of Rupertswood is one of the most disturbing to emerge ahead of the royal commission on institutional child sexual abuse. Yet alleged victims and former students say the truth about what happened is yet to be fully revealed. They paint a picture of repeated assaults, both sexual and physical; of brothers habitually haunting dormitories and infirmaries for victims; and of beatings and acts of perversion that persisted for decades.

  In one alleged episode aired in court recently, boys sleeping in the school's infirmary had their drinks of Milo drugged before waking to hear the cries of a boy being abused. Another student told the court of a separate incident in which he was given a glass of lemonade before waking to find a priest raping him.

  One student, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of confidentiality, reflected on how the college's good reputation belied its moral anarchy. ''It was like Lord of the Flies,'' he said. ''There was a hierarchy of priests who had their favourites.''

  FROM the outside, Rupertswood was idyllic. Built by Sir William Clarke in 1874, the beautifully situated 50-room stately home hosted many distinguished guests in its heyday, including royalty.

  The Roman Catholic Salesian Order bought the mansion in 1927, and from 1929 to the early '90s it was a school for boys. (Present-day Salesian College in Sunbury, a coeducational school located on the surrounding former Rupertswood estate, is not under suspicion or investigation.)

  At its peak, Rupertswood took up to 100 student boarders, as well as day students. Parents, according to victims, were reluctant to believe their claims of abuse, not least because of the school's good reputation. Priests were, after all, devout men of God who were beyond reproach and often invited to dinner by parents.

  Yet while an atmosphere of fear pervaded many corners of the school, it was not a living hell for every boy. Nor is it alleged that every brother who worked at the school was involved in the abuse or its cover-up.

  For some students, the strange behaviour of some of the brothers coexisted with happy school experiences. Former boarders reflect fondly how their day-student mates would leave them bottles of beer in a creek that ran through the property - a gesture of solidarity that was much appreciated.

  Former student Michael Derrick, a border from 1971 to 1975, says he was not abused; although a brother once tried to grope him - an incident, he soon learnt, that was not unusual.

  ''He received a short, sharp jab via my elbow to his nether regions and this seemed to dissuade him,'' Derrick says. ''He continued to try to groom me for further attempts but I was wary ... I was certainly not the only one of my peers that experienced his wandering hands, nor his manipulative attempts to get us alone.

  ''We were all aware of him and backed each other up via a 'safety in numbers' policy. We knew those things were going on and we looked out for each other and kept each other worded up ... It was just [one of] the strategies we put in place to survive.''

  Derrick says his parents sent him to the school under the impression it was strong on ''the basics'' - English, maths and science. But some of the teachers, particularly the young brothers, weren't qualified teachers. ''I think there were some that were still studying for their teaching degrees, if they were studying at all,'' he says.

  Still, he says he has many fond memories of experiences shared with classmates and staff, including singing at the school's chapel. ''If you went to Mass, it was just an expression of joy; that's what we had and we had it on a regular basis.''

  Yet just as natural as going to Mass was a wariness of certain priests and brothers.

  In a statement tendered to the Melbourne Magistrates Court during a committal hearing in November for one of the school's former priests, David Rapson, who has been charged with sexually abusing seven boys at Rupertswood, a former student described his experience as a year 7 boarder in 1976, staying with about 20 other boys in a dormitory.

  The boys would be asleep in a line of single beds as one of the Catholic brothers patrolled the dorms at night. ''If we dared move or whisper, we would be whacked over the ankles with the broom handle,'' the former student, now 49, said.

  A violent culture was also detailed in the 2004 biography of prominent Salesian priest Father Chris Riley, Mean Streets, Kind Heart, by Sue Williams. Riley said that some of the priests at Rupertswood were ''absolute maniacs'' and their violent behaviour made him question his decision to become a priest.

  He remembered seeing about two dozen of the youngest students lined up outside a washroom as a group of brothers took turns to belt them on the backside with a stick.

  ''He was incensed,'' Williams wrote. ''Chris faced up to the tormenters and shouted: 'You can't hit people, you're a Salesian. This isn't the Salesian way.'''

  Riley declined to be interviewed for this story.

  The recent committal hearing, however, has provided more graphic accounts. One student, who had been a boarder from 1977-78, described a night in the infirmary when he claimed up to 10 boys filed into the room before Rapson followed them in and said, ''There's no noise, no talking, no shouting.''

  ''He [Rapson] then said that everyone was going to have a Milo,'' the former student said. ''I remember the Milo tasted really strong and a bit acrid. I fell asleep and I remember waking up and feeling a bit groggy. Out of the blue I heard one of the kids yell out, 'What are you doing?' Rapson told him to shut up and be quiet or he would wake everyone up.''

  The former student said Rapson began going around to each bed before another priest, Father Frank Klep, came into the room. ''Klep said: 'What are you doing?'

  ''Rapson said: 'You know what we do here.'

  ''Klep said: 'You've really got to resist.'

  ''Rapson blamed God and said: 'God made us this way and it's his fault. You're one to talk, you're the same as me.'''

  Another former student told the court that in a separate incident, Rapson gave him a glass of lemonade which made him feel dizzy and pass out before he woke to find the priest raping him. ''Once back at my dormitory I got back into my bed and laid there crying. At the time all I wanted was my mum.''

  At the end of the hearing, Rapson, the former deputy principal, was ordered to stand trial in the County Court later this year charged with one count of rape, five counts of indecent assault, four counts of indecently assaulting a child under 16, and one count of gross indecency between 1973 and 1990.

  Rapson denies all allegations made against him. He is one of seven former priests or brothers at Rupertswood to have been publicly accused of abusing boys during their time at the school.

  Also accused is former college principal Frank Klep, who was moved by the Salesians to Samoa in 1998 just before he was to face court on five charges of indecent assault, having served nine months (doing community work) in 1994. He returned to Australia in 2004 and was jailed in 2006 for five years and 10 months.

  Another former principal, Julian Fox, is accused of abusing students during the 1970s and '80s. He has been banned by the Salesians from contact with children and now works for the order's head office in Rome.

  Michael Aulsebrook, who was boarding master at Rupertswood in the early 1990s, was sentenced in 2011 to two years in jail, with 15 months wholly suspended, after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting a 12-year-old Rupertswood student.

  Others include Father John ''Jack'' Ayres, accused of abusing students in the '60s and '70s, and who is believed to now live in a nursing home in Samoa; Brother Gregory Vincent Coffey, who pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent assault against two students in 1976 and 1977 at Immaculate Heart College in Preston after he left Rupertswood; and Brother Peter Paul Van Ruth, who molested two 12-year-old boys within weeks of his appointment as dormitory master in the late 1960s, and was jailed last March on three counts of indecent assault.

  Victoria Police say they are now using school year-books to contact hundreds of former students to ask if they had been victims or had witnessed abuse. Their initial investigation had focused on one suspect who had been at the school between 1980 and 1981, but the inquiry has been widened to encompass 1960 to 1990.

  Meanwhile, the memories linger. Derrick speaks of priests who ''just weren't like the other men you knew'', particularly given the way they behaved in the student communal washrooms.

  ''There would be a line of guys waiting for showers and some of these priests or brothers who were supervising would lean over the door instead of just banging on the door and telling you to get out. They would actually be peering over the door.''

  What upsets Derrick most is how others knew what was going on and chose to look the other way.

  A spokesman for the Salesian order declined to comment on the school's past. He said it now ran a co-educational day school near the old mansion of Rupertswood. ''The nature of the school is very different from what it was back then,'' the spokesman said. ''It provides excellent education for local kids and their families.

  ''All we can do is to continue the good work that is happening there and the other places where the Salesians have educational and outreach [services] to young people and continue to work with people in an open and honest, fair way.''

  Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-hell-house-20130112-2cmia.html#ixzz2JbCn5Sxg