Complaints against BoysTown dramatically increased in 2012, after a feature on
60 Minutes showed many former residents making allegations of physical and sexual abuse that had occurred at the institution. At the time, 35 former residents were litigating BoysTown for abuse, Days before the program aired, Ambrose Payne, the leader of the De La Salle order in Australia, circulated an email to staff describing the allegations as "lacking foundation". Ninety-nine people who worked at BoysTown were accused of sexually abusing children, though only two were convicted. In 2017, Brother Francis Brophy was convicted of 38 charges relating to sexually abusing children at BoysTown between 1978 and 1983. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. Brophy abused one boy for years in a shed while purporting to be giving private guitar lessons. Sentencing Judge William Everson described Brophy as a "cowardly, evil paedophile", and BoysTown as a "
gulag right in our midst". Stephen Anthony Gray, a former teacher at the school, was sentenced to six years' imprisonment in 2018 for sexually abusing four boys aged between 12 and 15 in the 1980s. and other De La Salle Brothers are still employed to work at yourtown, which is owned by the Trustees of the De La Salle Brothers. By 2017, the trustees for the De La Salle Brothers had paid almost $27 million in compensation for 219 credible claims of abuse, representing the highest figure against a single church-run institution in Australia. As of 2019, the De La Salle Brothers were still denying responsibility for abuse at BoysTown on the grounds children housed there were the responsibility of the
Queensland Government. ==References==