Personal Injury

Notorious convicted paedophile ring member and former Christian Brother Ted Bales has been sentenced to a further seven and a half years in jail after pleading guilty to an additional 33 charges of indecent assault against another 19 students in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing the total number of his known institutional sexual abuse victims to 50.

Ted Bales, now 72 and who changed his name from Edward Dolan in the 1990s in an attempt to avoid scrutiny due to the notoriety of his initial convictions, was due to be released in February 2023 but is now expected to remain behind bars until 2029.

Although he has pleaded guilty and served time for his child sexual abuse, Ted Bales has never expressed any remorse for his sex crimes or for the life-long trauma that he has caused his many abuse victims.

“Those boys still suffer from the trauma… some have attempted suicide… They speak of feeling depressed… with difficulty in relationships or employment,” Judge Lyon said at the sentencing recently.

At his initial trial in 1996, the then Edward Vernon Dowlan was revealed to have attended Christian Brothers primary school at Alphington where the chaplain was the prolific child-abuse perpetrator Father Desmond Gannon who was subsequently jailed for his crimes.

After doing further religious education plus teacher training, Brother Ted Dowlan taught at a large number of schools and colleges, including the following (compiled by Broken Rites):-

• St Alipius primary school (Ballarat East) in 1971 (where he became a full-time offender);
• St Thomas More College in Forest Hills (Melbourne) in 1972 (this later become Emmaus College);
• St Patrick’s College (Ballarat) in 1973-74);
• Warrnambool Christian Brothers College in 1975-76 (later re-named Emmanuel College);
• St Brendan’s in Devonport (Tasmania) in the late 1970s;
• Chanel College, Geelong in 1980;
• St Augustine’s boys’ orphanage in Geelong for part of 1981;
• Parade College preparatory school, Alphington, Melbourne, for part of 1981;
• Cathedral College (East Melbourne) in 1982-85;
• St Mary’s Technical School, Geelong, in 1987-8;
• St Vincent’s boys’ orphanage, South Melbourne, in 1989; and
• Geelong Catholic Regional College in 1990-3.

If you or anyone you know had any contact with these institutions during this time or were directly or indirectly impacted by the abusive practices that went on there, please let us know. Your information might help the countless other victims of historical institutional child sexual abuse.