How Was This Even Allowed?

I’ve asked before, and I’ll ask again: when do we start spitting on teachers?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. I’m not really advocating hawk tuah-ing on random chalkies. Most of them are more-or-less dedicated professionals who do a pretty good job. Some are actually brilliant and care about the kids under their tutelage. We all have fond memories of favourite teachers.

But, then, the same could be said for priests. But, metaphorically and literally, it’s become fashionable to spit on clergy and churches because of the shameful past record of covering up for a minority of disgusting abusers in clerical ranks.

Over to you, teachers and education bureaucracy…

A “psychopathic” paedophile, who later boasted of sexually abusing 2,000 boys, was employed as a Victorian Education Department school teacher despite declaring in a 1970s job application form that he was a convicted child abuser.

According to documents seen by ABC Investigations, William Alexander Allen was employed for close to a decade as a Victorian Education Department high school music teacher despite admitting in a 1973 job application form that he’d been convicted in 1966 of sexually abusing two of his students during a previous stint of employment as a government school teacher.

Yet, seven years earlier, he’d been convicted of “indecency” with a male and a female student. Before that, he’d been medically discharged from the Army on the grounds of a “psychopathic personality”.

Worse, Allen was proud of being a paedophile and openly boasted on television in the mid-’80s (after his 1982 retirement) that he’d abused 2,000 boys. He “devoted his entire adult life to paedophilia” and advocacy for he and his fellow molesters.

William Allen first came to public attention in 1983, when “Australian Paedophile Support Group” meetings convened by Allen and other paedophiles were infiltrated by detectives from Victoria Police’s Delta Taskforce child protection unit.

As a result of Delta’s Operation Rockspider, Allen and seven other alleged sex offenders – including another government school teacher subsequently convicted of abusing students – were arrested during a raid of a house in Melbourne’s Clifton Hill.

Although convicted in 1985, Allen, who’d appeared on a current affairs program boasting of his thousands of “conquests”, he was handed an astonishingly lenient five-year good behaviour bond. That sentence was, at least, appealed by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

With jail time looming, 64-year-old Allen died by suicide during a court adjournment in September 1985.

In a coronial inquest deposition seen by ABC Investigations, a Victoria Police detective wrote that Allen “would kill himself rather than go to gaol” and be prevented from abusing children.

Allen is practically a case study in what journalist Roisin Michaux notes of paedophilia activists: they are aggrieved, organised, and determined to win.

“Allen had great admiration for paedophiles who had become martyrs for the cause,” the deposition continued.

“In Allen’s autobiography, he stated he would die a boy lover and obviously saw himself as a martyr for the paedophile cause.”

“If [the autobiography] is accepted it appears that Allen devoted his entire adult life to paedophilia … In recent years Allen became a prominent activist in the gay community for paedophile rights. He was a prolific article writer to a wide range of gay magazines and was the convenor of a paedophile forum and workshop at Latrobe University in September, 1983.”

(Emphasis added.)

That’s the same Latrobe University that’s home to the “Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society”, a Queer Theory thinktank home for decades to its Deputy Director, Professor Gary Dowsett. Dowsett is notorious for writing pro-paedophile essays for gay magazines in the 1980s. “Paedophiles need our support,” he wrote. More recently, he publicly questioned the need for an Age of Consent.

Latrobe’s ARCSHS was also the birthplace of Victoria’s notorious “Safe Schools” programme, developed by its Roz Ward, who boasts that her “job” is to teach kids “to be gay and communist”. Another ARCSHS academic, Steven Angelides, wrote that children frequently enjoy and “feel a sense of power and control in sexual encounters with adults”.

“Allen had clearly stated his objectives as a paedophile, both in his literature and at public meetings. The objectives were total acceptance of paedophiles by the general community and the abolition of laws preventing child sex.”

ABC Australia

Even churches never boasted that paedo priests were somehow doing God’s work in abusing children.