THE NAZARETH HOUSE SCANDALS/3-PART 3

The Edinburgh lawyer representing Nazareth House, Dr Pamela Abernathy, insists, "No one still alive who was intimately connected with Nazareth House at the time has any recollection of such an incident, nor are there any records of the death of any child during that period." When the retired telephonist recently began to make inquiries about Betsy Owens, the order responded by denying any knowledge that she herself had ever been there that summer. They said there were no records of her presence. It seems that, she, like Betsy Owens, might never have existed. But in her collection of personal records, there is the evidence: a telegram adorned with top hats and lucky horseshoes, addressed to her at Aberdeen's Nazareth House on August 3, 1955, saying, "Happy Birthday Darling, from Mummy." She was there. This woman, like Currie and Cusiter, has joined the civil action against the Sisters of Nazareth because they believe it is the only way of calling the order to account. She and her sisters were in Nazareth House for just 18 months - they left when their father, who regularly made the long trek across the country to see his daughters, suddenly arrived in his work clothes to take them away. To this day, she doesn't know what had so alarmed him - all visits were patrolled by nuns who remained in the room, like sentries. The children didn't speak about what had happened, "none of us did, believe it or not". But it left the family with inconsolable sadness. "We had wonderful parents. Right to her death, Mum kept saying, 'If only I hadn't got ill.' She thought it was her fault. It broke her heart." Her father took the child to the local priest "to explain what he'd discovered and how angry he was for his children, but the priest never took it up". Her own efforts to challenge the hierarchy of the church have been distressing and her association with the public campaign against the Sisters enraged other members of her congregation. "I was spat on. After we pray, we shake hands, but one woman refused and said I was bringing the church down. I said, 'No, this is about crimes against children.' " She is outraged by suggestions that her motivation is securing compensation. "I didn't want money. We have tried every way to get the church to accept what happened, but they've done nothing. Nothing. These are major things, the experience was a severe danger to people's lives." She points out that "15 members of my group have taken their own lives. I am all right, I'm surviving. I don't need financial help. Money would never take away what happened - God's representatives on earth behaving in such an appalling manner." She had worried about what had happened for years. "I need answers, not just about Betsy but about the whole damned thing. I telephoned Cardinal Winning, and asked him to do something about all the things that were coming to light about Nazareth House. He said very little, I would have liked him just to say sorry. He wasn't prepared to accept that it was the truth. I felt terrible all over again." Kathleen Batey, a 47-year-old cleaner living near Newcastle United Football Club's mighty stadium, is not one of the campaigners seeking legal redress. She has never consulted lawyers, nor sought compensation from the church. "I don't want their money," she says. "I just want it out of my mind." And, like all of those involved in the civil action, she wants to have her story heard. Kathleen Batey's back is lined with a ladder of scars - they are the relics of her life at Nazareth House in Tyneside, received, she says, when nuns took off the belts buckled round their habits and beat her. She was sent to the orphanage, with her brother, when she was five - her grandmother had just died, her mother had left, and her father felt he could not take care of the children. She remembers Nazareth the house as "spooky, horrible". She, too, remembers children being force-fed, and also being required to work. "There was a big polished floor, it was really polished. They'd cut up woollen jumpers and we had to put them on our feet and we had to skate on the floor and make sure the shine came up. If you did it wrong, you got a clip." Or worse. "The nuns would take off the belt and just hit you with it. It was just the routine." The punishments accelerated, she says, after she and her brother began running away. In vain, they'd find their father, but before long the police would turn up to take them back. Their father didn't stop them: "I thought there was nobody. Dad didn't want us, nobody loved us, no one took care of us." The violence in the orphanage didn't seem exceptional to her, just part of life. What often makes detection of childhood abuse difficult for the police is that it's an adult's word against a child's, and there often isn't any surviving physical evidence (a sign, say the sceptics, that abuse didn't happen or that it didn't cause any harm). This may be qualified in cases of alleged institutional abuse because there is sometimes a chain of corroboration. Cameron Fyfe says there's no great problem of proof in this case: individuals who have not seen each other for years, who may scarcely remember each other, are corroborating each other's narratives. They are recalling what were, after all, very public regimes of pain and punishment. The survivors have to get past the argument that the religious orders merely delivered the discipline that was standardised, sanctioned and universal in those days. The Sisters of Nazareth lawyer, Dr Abernathy, points out that Nazareth Houses were overseen by local authorities and by the government. There were frequent visits by "children's officers, town councillors, inspectors, including doctors and psychologists from the home and health department". None the less, there have been scandals and debates within the church about the ill-treatment of children for decades. Eoin O'Sullivan, the Irish historian of Catholic orphanages and schools, cites a very public challenge to the church by Father Flanagan, the priest whose humane childcare was the model for Spencer Tracy in the film, Men Of Boys Town. This embarrassed both church and state in the 1940s. "Violence was an intrinsic part of the culture of these institutions," O'Sullivan says; they were committed to the "destruction of will". He has unearthed state archives revealing many complaints about cruelty and inspectors' concerns about "dangerous and undesirable punishment". Violent discipline, he says, was not uncontested. Father Tindall, the church's child protection coordinator in the north-east of England, ventured: "Too much of the organised culture of the church was very disciplined and rule-bound, and gave an opportunity for people under pressure to use the language of discipline to be punitive." What was it, though, that caused such cruelty by women? Sister Margaret McCurtain, a glinting Dominican scholar and one of Ireland's best-known Catholic reformers, suggests the "sexual oppression of nuns could emerge later in the form of cruelty". She also comments that the very notion of charity was "a virtue that never brought with it affectivity." Feminist scholar Ailbhe Smyth adds, "Christianity tells us that we have to help the poor, but we don't have to like them. It is a Christian duty, for your greater glory, not theirs. There is, in this context, an absence of any recognition that tenderness should be the norm in relations between adults and children." The orphanage survivors' civil case must show that their complaints refer not just to rogue nuns but to a regime for which the order itself was responsible. Cameron Fyfe insists that similar stories have surfaced against the Sisters of Nazareth in Australia and Ireland, where their practices, such as the response to bed-wetting and the force-feeding, "were very similar and esoteric". Fyfe argues that the cultures of orphanages and schools tend to be specific and different - he also represents clients who were in the hands of the de la Salle monks in Britain, against whom there are more allegations of sexual abuse than there are against the Nazareth House nuns. The Nazareth House children face another difficulty: the time bar. "After a real struggle, we have persuaded the legal aid board to support 11 test cases," says Fyfe. All of these concern allegations of ill-treatment after 1964. The current limit on cases before that date is being challenged in the courts, and members of the Scottish parliament are mooting a change in the law. If that fails, Fyfe intends to take the challenge to the European Court of Human Rights. Cases are being compiled in England, too, though there seems to be some reluctance to prosecute physical abuse. Sex with children is a crime, but "reasonable chastisement is still a lawful reason for inflicting pain on children," explains David Spicer, a barrister and former chair of the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. Dr Abernathy denies the allegations of cruelty and abuse, and argues that for 130 years the Sisters of Nazareth "devoted their entire lives to the care of orphans, abandoned children, children from broken homes and in many cases children referred from the courts. Many of these unfortunate children suffered consequential emotional disturbance, and some of them no other institutions would accept." Francis Docherty is 58 and runs a helpline, Historical Survivors of In-Care Abuse, whose cases include people as old as 95 who are still suffering, still searching for their lost brothers and sisters, still trying to sort things out. He was brought up in Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. "The horrifying thing was that being hurt by implements was bad enough, but to see a holy person, a righteous person with - I don't want to exaggerate - a face full of hate, an angelic, holy face turning into a face of horror, a woman crunching her teeth in hate, going berserk, screaming while you are pleading for mercy, the wee leather boots just booting into you. Bruises go away, but the horror stays in your mind." Docherty, too, has joined the action against the Daughters of Charity and the Sisters of Nazareth. "This isn't revenge against the Catholic church, we just want them to come out of denial. They've always ruled by fear. It's their power mania. These people told you that you were the scum of the earth. Maybe you started to believe it." Docherty worked for most of his life as a driver, and for as many years he has been "in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. I haven't taken a drink for more than five years," he says. He is never surprised by attempts to discredit people like himself. "We've had a lifetime of being accused of being liars and cheats, searching for a pot of gold." Archbishop Conti has not only accused the victims of seeking pots of gold, he has told them that, "on your part, there is a need to forgive". That's not up to the Archbishop, says Docherty. "It's up to us whether we want to forgive. Give us an apology. All we want is for the Catholic church to change its ways and let us live in peace."