WARNING: Graphic
A judge has described how a pedophile and disgraced former Christian Brother inflicted a “lifetime of damage and misery” on his victims as the court was told of the vile crimes students suffered at the hands of Edward Dowlan.
Dowlan, who now goes by the name Ted Bales, was sentenced in Victoria’s County Court on Thursday to seven years and six months jail, with a non-parole period of four years and nine months, after a further 19 former students came forward with harrowing allegations of sexual abuse.
Bales targeted the young male students at schools in Ballarat, Warrnambool and Melbourne.
His shocking “sustained” abuse spanned across the 1970s and 1980s when he was aged in his 20s and 30s, the court was told.
Earlier this year he pleaded guilty to nine fresh charges of indecent assault on a male person under 16 years of age and 24 charges of indecent assault relating to the 19 victims – taking his total number of victims to 50.
Bales appeared in the County Court on Friday via video link from Hopkins Correctional Centre.
He kept his head bowed while Judge Greg Lyon detailed his sickening crimes that included “whispering” in a boy’s ear and “rubbing his genitals”.
Other incidents involved Bales rubbing a student’s penis through his pyjamas and telling them to show him “some love” while he abused him.
He also pushed his erect penis against a student in a classroom and grabbed his buttocks while putting his hand inside other students’ pants to touch their buttocks and bare genitals, the court was told.
Bales also watched a student urinate and entered the boys’ dorm on campus to “show them how to dry themselves properly”. The court was told he towel-dried one of the victim’s genitals.
Bales told one of the students that his abuse was “your little secret” and would ask them: “Do you love Brother?”
“Those around you trusted you to care, protect and comfort those in your charge. Instead, you exploited your position of trust and did so since the beginning of your career,” Judge Lyon told the court.
“Your offending is to be utterly deplored.”
Bales was a teacher and dormitory supervisor at schools in Victoria where the attacks took place.
He was also a Christian Brother until he left the order in 2008.
Many of Dowlan’s victims, now adults, had their harrowing victim impact statements read in court earlier this year.
Judge Lyon described the statements as powerful and moving.
“They make it perfectly obvious that you have inflicted on them a lifetime of damage and misery,” he told the court.
“Those young boys still suffer from the trauma of your actions in adulthood.
“(You) cheated them out of a life they could have had.”
Now 72, Bales has been in prison since 2015. His first stint behind bars was in 1996 when he was jailed for almost a decade for sexually abusing 11 children while teaching.
He was jailed again in 2015 to a maximum of six years after pleading guilty to molesting another 20 students.
But the prosecution successfully appealed the sentence in the Court of Appeal and it was increased to a eight years and five months, with a non-parole period of five years and eight months.
Bales will remain behind bars until at least the end of 2026.
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