Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Other Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Bindoon, Western Australia, Australia · 1954

Bindoon Farm School: Royal Commission finding on abuse of child migrants in Christian Brothers care

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

Superior of a Christian Brothers farm school, Christian Brothers Provincial Council

Organization

Bindoon Farm School, Congregation of Christian Brothers (Western Australia)

Spiritual nexus

The children were migrants sent from Britain and Malta into Christian Brothers custody with no other guardian in the country; the Superior held the institution's supreme religious, custodial and disciplinary authority over them, and the Congregation's internal handling of allegations is what kept it intact.

  • Institutional obedience or isolation
  • Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2014-12-01 · royal commission case-study finding

    Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Australia — Case Study No. 11. The Royal Commission found that Brother Paul Francis Keaney, Superior of Bindoon Farm School, was named by multiple survivors as a perpetrator, one abused from age 11 to 16. Thirteen Brothers in total were named as perpetrators at Bindoon. The Commission found the Christian Brothers Provincial Council was aware of sexual-abuse allegations across Bindoon, Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun through the 1940s and 1950s but managed them internally rather than reporting them. Keaney died in 1954 and was never prosecuted.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • total custodial authority over child migrants with no other guardian
  • internal management of allegations instead of reporting

Primary record

Sources

official statutory inquiry report inquiry report Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 'Report of Case Study No. 11: Christian Brothers in Western Australia' (Dec. 2014).

The royal commission records the perpetrators named at Bindoon and the Provincial Council's awareness and internal handling of allegations across the four institutions.

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