Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/785757
4 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2017 News SLAVEDRIVERS. ABUSERS. RAPISTS. MEN OF GOD. Maltese children at Bindoon Boys' Town 1952, child migrants sent by their parents in the hope of being given a better opportunity for life. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia IN 1928, Perth-based Maltese priest Fr Raphael Pace urged the Congregation of the Christian Brothers to include Maltese chil- dren in its emerging migration scheme. The Irish order was es- pecially dedicated to the evange- lisation and education of youth. Negotiations between the Maltese and Western Australian govern- ments continued through the 1930s but the first Maltese child migrants did not arrive in Aus- tralia until after World War II. Between 1950 and 1965, 259 boys and 51 girls were sent to Catholic institutions in Western Australia and South Australia. Most parents believed their chil- dren would receive a better edu- cation in Australia. Instead many were put to work on the Chris- tian Brothers' building projects, some were forced to stop using their Maltese language and never learned to read or write English. They were also brutally sexually abused and physically punished. Last week, a report by the Aus- tralian Royal Commission into child sexual abuse released damn- ing statistics on the scale of the crisis within the Catholic Church, which shows that seven per cent of Australia's Catholic priests were accused of abusing children in the six decades since 1950. By far the worst was the order of the St John of God Brothers, where a staggering 40% of reli- gious brothers are believed to have abused children; 22% of Christian Brothers and 20% of Marist Broth- ers, both orders that run schools, were alleged perpetrators. In total, between 1980 and 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse relating to 93 Catholic Church authorities. The abuse allegedly took place in more than 1,000 institutions. The aver- age age of victims was 10.5 for girls and 11.6 for boys. The overwhelm- ing majority of survivors were male. Almost 1,900 perpetrators were identified and another 500 remained unidentified. VG* [name withheld by the Royal Commission] came to Aus- tralia as a child migrant in the early 1960s. Born out of wedlock,