Bindoon Farm School: Royal Commission finding on abuse of child migrants in Christian Brothers care
Request a correction or replyRecord 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)
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
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
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
Cited 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.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies/case-study-11-christian-brothers Corpus classification: official-statutory-inquiry-report; evidentiary role: inquiry-report.
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
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