Royal Commission probe: Teen cadet shares sexual assault involving dog at Army Apprentice School

It is not just forced fellatio and sodomy from fellow teen male cadets that Australian military recruits suffered, sexual abuses committed against junior recruits include at least one instance of bestiality against a 15-year-old apprentice. The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse heard on Friday an ex-apprentice at the Army Apprentice School in Balcombre, Victoria, recount the involvement of a dog in his sexual assault.

The incident happened in 1978 when senior apprentices and staff of the school stripped the clothes of the apprentice and placed Vegemite on his groin and genitals. Then they brought in a dog to lick the teen’s private parts.

The elder teens even tried to force the dog against his behind which scared him because the apprentice feared the dog would bite his genitals. Confirming what cadets from HMAS Leeuwin shared to the commission the past hearings, the teen also says he was threatened not to report the incident.

“They said, ‘This is the only way you’re ever going to have sex. You’re a dog for reporting us. If you tell anyone about anything else, the next time it will be worse and we’ll kill you,” the former apprentice recounts. In turned out he previously reported an incident of a physical assault which resulted in him suffering from a broken arm.

SkyNews reports that beside the bestiality incident, the apprentice was also raped twice by a civilian working in the school’s laundry and a captain who initially befriended him. When he recounted his sufferings to his father, a former serviceman, and said he wanted to leave, his parents told him he was only homesick.

The teen was advised by the school’s staff that such incidents happen to cadets and he needed to get used to it as part of his daily life. In 1989, he left the army, but he reported the abuses to the Defence Abuse Response Task Force in 2013. The following year, he disclosed his bizarre experience, which scarred him, as a teen in the hands of his military officers to his family.

Alan McDonald, a staff at the school from 1972 through 1976, says he too was stunned to hear the cadet’s story. However, McDonald says he is unaware although shock and saddened to hear the testimony. He adds the recruits kept such incidents to themselves which explains why he only heard of the abuses only now.

The abuses in such institutions, apparently, also happened in England in the 1940s.

VIDEO: 1940s Army Apprentices School for English Teenage Boys (Caning Controversy)