HALIFAX- Nova Scotia government officials are

protecting alleged child abusers by failing to

aggressively pursue cases such as that of a former
provincial youth centre employee who recently
admitted molesting boys that the lawyer for several
abuse victims says.

William M Leahey said that two interviews
conducted with former counselors at the school by
provincial investigators one of the former
counselors was convicted of 11 counts of abusing
boys at Shelburne but now denies any sexual
encounters indicate that leads are not being
followed up in the probe of sexual and physical
abuse at provincial centers.



The attitude of the Crown appears to be that it wills
not under any circumstances follow up even the most
obvious leads, even when those leads come from the
admission of perpetrators themselves, Mr. Leahey
complained in a letter to provincial government lawyer
William Wilson last week.

That letter is part of an application Mr. Leahey will
make the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia today asking
the government to fund an independent review of its
file on the Shelburne School of Boys during the year
1960s and 1970s, when the abuse is alleged to have
taken place.

As part of that application, Mr. Leahey has also filed
the transcripts of two interviews conducted by
members of the Department of Judicial independent
investigation unit, which is reviewing hundreds of
abuse complaints from former youth centre residents.
He received the transcripts from the province on Dec.
31, 1997.

Last May, a former counselor at the Shelburne School
of Boys Paul Aucoin, told two provincial investigators
that he had sexual encounters with three boys at
Shelburne when he was a teacher there 25 years
ago. According to a transcript for the interview with
investigators Gordon Legge and Allan Richardson,
Mr. Aucoin made the admission after the denied
allegations by two former Shelburne residents that the
counselors tried to physically force them to engage in
oral sex with him. Mr. Aucoin told investigators that he
was acknowledging the sexual encounters, which
included oral sex and foundling, as a sort of way for
me to try make peace with myself.

He said he never meant to hurt anyone and he felt
remorse and shame over what happened at
Shelburne in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he
was there. Its embarrassing and shaming and very
painful for me to be his honest, Mr. Aucoin said
during the interview.



According to the transcript, Mr. Legge told Mr. Aucoin
that the information from the interview would be
forwarded to the government of Nova Scotia and
possibly to the RCMP, which is conducting a massive
investigation of the more then 1,400 allegations of
abuse at Shelburne and several other Nova Scotia
youth centers.

Mr. Leahey said in an interview that the investigators
failed to press Mr. Aucoin for information about the
abuse he was involved in and didnt even mention
the allegations of Martin Smith, who is now suing the
province alleging that senior government officials
were aware of allegations against some Shelburne
counselors and failed to protect him when he says he
was abused by Mr. Aucoin and another counselor,
Patrick MacDougall in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Leahey questioned whether the Department of
Justice had made any attempt to locate and offer
counseling to the boys Mr. Aucion named in his
interview with investigators or if the file was
forwarded to the RCMP for further investigations.