Head of Trinity Grammar in Sydney misled school council on abuse claims
Trinity grammar school’s longtime headmaster misled the prestigious Sydney school’s council over the handling of allegations of boarders sexually abusing other boys, a royal commission has found.
The school council had expressed full confidence in its headmaster, Milton Cujes, and staff over the way they dealt with allegations of boarders being sexually abused with wooden implements in 2000.
But the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse found Trinity’s school council was misled by the head, who is retiring at the end of this year after 21 years in the role.
The allegations came to light in August 2000 after a student, known as CLB, alleged some boarders tried to rape him, and that other boys had been sexually assaulted using wooden dildos on multiple occasions before that incident.
The commission said if senior school psychologist Katherine Lumsdaine had not carried out her own inquiries, there would have been no investigation into sexual assaults occurring in the boarding house in 2000.
Apart from Lumsdaine’s investigation, Trinity did not seek out other boys who may have been assaulted, the commission said in findings released on Wednesday.
“It follows that support was not given to the boys affected.”
In February 2001, around the time two boys pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting another Trinity student known as CLA, the school council backed staff’s handling of the boarding house allegations.
The commission found Cujes did not disclose that he, the boarding master and senior master were aware of CLB’s August allegations, thereby misleading the council about the adequacy of their response.
Cujes and Trinity had argued against such a finding.
The commission also found another elite Sydney boys school, the King’s School, failed to report an assault allegation to police that occurred amid a bullying culture.
A boarder was called crude names and bullied after a fellow student ejaculated on his sleeping bag during a 2013 camp.
No one at King’s reported the incident to police despite having written advice from an officer that it likely constituted assault with an act of indecency, the commission said. “This was a failure in the senior management of the school.”
During the inquiry, King’s longtime headmaster Dr Timothy Hawkes, who retired in June this year, accepted it was a “catastrophic failure” by the school.
The commission said the measures Australia’s oldest independent school took to address the bullying of the boarder were ineffective.
“We are satisfied that as of 2013 a bullying culture existed at King’s, both inside the boarding houses and in the school more generally.”
The commission also looked at the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by four male students on the grounds of the Shalom Christian College in 2006.
The girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a student a month earlier but the Queensland Indigenous school took no action, the commission said.
“It follows that Shalom’s inaction exposed CLF to the risk of further sexual assaults while at school.”
The commission found an unnamed independent boarding school failed to report credible sexual assault allegations involving students to police and also held private hearings into three government primary schools.