'It turned a blind eye': How the Victorian education department enabled abusive teachers and put children at risk
For decades, Victoria's education department shuffled paedophile teachers to new schools where they abused more schoolchildren. As the historical scale of the scourge in the Victorian public system becomes clearer, there are calls for the state to confront the issue with a broader inquiry.
www.abc.net.au
How was the non treatment of historical sex crime kept so secret for so long?
Why was this ABC investigation 'dropped' on a Sunday morning ?
So many questions.
How the Victorian Education Department's historical child sexual abuse scandal was hidden for decades
'The story ...... would soon be understood as a microcosm of the unravelling crisis of historical sexual abuse in the Victorian education system. It would reveal in granular detail the methods by which the Victorian Education Department had covered up the sexual abuse of children — methods that lawyers for survivors say have been identified in dozens of other cases.'
The catchwords..... for sentencing remarks were succinct and compelling: "historical sexual offending"; "42 charges"; "38 child complainants"; "period of offending about 31 years"; "abuse of power"; "gross breach of trust"; "brazen and prolonged offending"; "systemic failures in duty of care".
.......'the negligent dithering of the Victorian Education Department administrators who were aware of them.'
'Reynolds (the offender) would admit that the psychologist had told him his chances of rehabilitation were so low that it would be "bloody stupid" for the department to send him back into classrooms, where he "would continue to offend".
But when local police declined to press charges, sending Reynolds back into classrooms is exactly what the Victorian Education Department did. This was the point, Reynolds later told his lawyers, at which he felt he was being granted "permission to re-offend".
Between 1981 and 1992, at the Kiewa Valley, Dederang, Myrtleford, Yackandandah and Beechworth primary schools, Vincent Reynolds not only resumed his sexual abuse of boys with almost reckless abandon, but started assaulting girls too.
Reynolds told one victim: "You like that, don't ya?"'
Where will this expos'e go ?
'Their history is of abuse, systemic negligence and covering up for paedophiles'
Most agree that government school abuse peaked between the early 1960s, when societal naivety and institutional indifference combined to savagely undermine the rights of children almost everywhere, and the late 1980s, after which mandatory reporting requirements were introduced.They were decades of rapid societal change and, in the teaching profession, seemingly endless industrial chicanery. Underpaid and overworked, schoolteachers were nevertheless well organised. In the years of overcrowded classrooms, they were difficult to sack and replace.
And it was not just Education Department directors, district school inspectors, principals, parents and fellow teachers who looked the other way as abusers ran rampant. A more widespread indifference to the daily experiences of schoolchildren was exemplified when a journalist of the early 1970s was instructed by the education editor of a major Melbourne newspaper "not to write about what was going on in the classroom because nobody was interested".
You need to read the full report to understand the many issues raised.
'Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made last year by Hinch Justice Party MP Stuart Grimley revealed that since 2010, 381 civil litigation claims have been made against the Victorian government for sexual abuse that allegedly occurred between 1960 and 2018 in Victorian educational settings.
From a further FOI request to the Federal Department of Social Services, Grimley was informed that in its four years of operation, the National Redress Scheme — which offers counselling, apologies and capped compensation to survivors who don't want to pursue legal claims — had processed 1,639 applications from survivors of abuse in Victorian government settings. As of May 2022, 318 of them related to schools.'
Lawyers for abuse survivors, who have been filing writ after writ in Melbourne's civil courts since the conclusion of the royal commission, go even further than Grimley.
"At first I couldn't believe how common it was," says John Rule, who leads the abuse team at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers and has represented dozens of plaintiffs who've sued the Victorian Education Department in historical childhood sexual abuse matters.
"I tell people the Victorian Education Department are the worst to deal with, and that as far as cover-ups, they're every bit as bad as the worst bits of the Catholic Church, and people can't believe it.
"The cover-up was comprehensive, and they managed to slip through the gaps in terms of inquiries and royal commissions, so they've never been properly looked at or had their feet held to the fire. The extent of the problem has never been publicly documented, therefore the Education Department has never had to address it or grapple with it in any way."
Indeed, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse did not examine a single case study specific to Victorian Education Department schools. Neither did the Victorian government's own Betrayal of Trust inquiry of 2013, which probed only religious and non-government institutions.'
