When child cruelty reigned

When child cruelty reigned 31.08.2002 By GREG ANSLEY, Australia correspondent Nazareth House was a great grim building, its brick walls rising from the Brisbane suburb of Wynnum North, softened only by a sparse cluster of palms.Inside, its pious austerity moved one Queensland child-care officer to report: "The design of the building itself is along the lines of a monastery, with cloisters, crucifixes, statues etc in great abundance."First impressions of it are that it is a very cold, imposing place, and it must be extremely frightening for a child, especially one of tender years, to be placed there."For 60 years, thousands of children passed through that terror, placed in the care of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth - officially as orphans, but too frequently because they were unwanted or had nowhere else to go.This week Nazareth House gained national infamy in revelations published in The Bulletin of brutal sexual assault by nuns, rape by priests, and floggings of unimaginable cruelty.Former resident Lizzie Walsh (her name has now changed) told The Bulletin of violence that began when she was 11, of a nun raping her with a flagstick to "get the devil out", and of being forced to drink urine and eat a nun's faeces and rotting fish crawling with maggots.Frighteningly similar allegations are contained in the statements of claim lodged by 17 women in the Queensland Supreme Court against the Trustees of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth and the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.A week before Walsh's allegations shocked the nation, Dr George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Vatican aspirant and leader of Australia's largest faith, stepped aside to allow the Church to investigate claims that as a trainee priest in 1961 he molested a 12-year-old boy.Governor-General Dr Peter Hollingworth has failed to convince many Australians that he was not involved in the cover-up of sexual abuse of children by clergy during his term as Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane.The appalling revelations of the New South Wales inquiry into paedophilia uncovered widespread child abuse within both major faiths, and in Victoria a former friend and housemate of Pell, Father Gerald Ridsdale, was jailed for 15 years as "Australia's most notorious paedophile".With such a deep and apparently bottomless pool of infamy, the latest claims against the Poor Sisters of Nazareth tend to harden perceptions - unfairly - of religion as a national repository of depravity.But Nazareth House, which closed its orphanage in 1982, was only one part of a much larger system that for much of the last century institutionalised abuse, cruelty and deprivation in Queensland.As in NSW, this abuse extended well beyond church institutions, into Government schools, homes and reformatories that practised brutality with equal enthusiasm: Westbrook Training Centre, for example, where naked boys on all fours were flogged on the buttocks and forced to cry "Ooh sir, ooh sir," until the administering superintendent tired."One act of abuse or mistreatment toward a child is one act too many," Leneen Forde, chairwoman of a Queensland Government inquiry into the abuse of children in State institutions, wrote in her report. "Repeated acts of abuse that have gone unrecognised and unaddressed are inexcusable ... How was it that numbers of children, while under the guardianship of the State and in the care of some of our most esteemed denominational bodies, were able to be abused?"The same question has increasingly exercised Australians appalled at the light that has been cast into the nation's darkest corners over the past two decades: the abduction and enslavement of countless Aboriginal children by Church and State and the horrific treatment of indigenous young on reservations and in institutions; the confinement of and endemic cruelty to orphaned or unwanted British children sent to Australia; the sexual exploitation of the most vulnerable by those assigned to protect them.The Queensland inquiry, covering the century-long operations of more than 150 Church and State orphanages and detention centres, set the abuse in the context of a system cobbled together by ignorance, under-funding and shameful lack of care and supervision.Few of the children placed in orphanages were, in fact, orphans - most were removed from their families by the State or placed there by parents unable or unwilling to care for them - and many imprisoned in reformatories and detention centres should never have been incarcerated.Some boys were locked away simply because they turned 14 and had nowhere else to go. Girls were effectively imprisoned because they had become sexually active and were therefore in "moral danger".Many "uncontrollable" girls were consigned to mental institutions, despite the fact that few had any psychiatric need to be there.Forde's inquiry pointed to a tragic confluence of factors.Until the 1960s, it said, there was little understanding of the emotional needs of children or of the severe impact mistreatment would have on later life; society was blissfully and even wilfully ignorant, believing that if children were in the care of Church or upstanding citizens they were safe; nor could many conceive of the sexual abuse of children.Institutions were chronically under-funded, short-staffed and isolated from the rest of society, frequently with minimal supervision. Staff were often young, untrained and intimidated by senior colleagues, whose own beliefs and behaviour frequently determined the treatment of children in their care.To save money, the State encouraged Church orphanages and it also believed a religious upbringing was as close to Christian family life as possible. Government supervision was minimal and, Forde said, bland official reporting on conditions was probably designed to avoid antagonising a cheap service provider.The consequences were severe.For much of last century Church and State institutions in Queensland operated on the basis of strict discipline in which, Forde reported, staff indifference frequently extended into mental cruelty. Daily humiliation was a norm.Beatings and floggings were endemic, with numerous examples of "gross excesses ... beyond any acceptable boundary in any period". Under some notorious supervisors, some institutions developed a culture of brutality.Sexual abuse was common, food and diet frequently inadequate - at Nazareth House children eked out their rations by eating grass and scavenging in rubbish bins - clothing was often insufficient and ill-fitting, and education poor.Most institutions were overcrowded. Children were packed into dormitories in an almost total absence of privacy.At the Catholic St Vincent's Orphanage in Nudgee, there were no doors to the showers and no toilet cubicles: children sat beside each other in a row. In the dining room cockroaches "thrived" on bench tables and swallows flew overhead, their droppings "constituting a mealtime hazard".The Salvation Army's Riverview Industrial School for Boys continued to operate in the 1970s with a condemned electricity supply, took its water from either rain or from a nearby river into which a meatworks discharged its effluent, and operated a condemned piggery which also discharged its effluent into the same river.Discipline was harsh. One matron at the Presbyterian WR Black Home punished children by depriving them of their meals, force-feeding them, or making them stand with their arms in the air, beating them if their arms fell. She also burnt a girl with a hot iron and opened another's head with a pair of scissors.Left-handed children in religious institutions were beaten to "get the Devil out of them" because the Devil, apparently, is left-handed.At Riverview, staff used canes tipped with sand to inflict greater pain, beating boys so severely with canes their hands bled. One child was caned, thrown into the Brisbane River and thrashed again because "he had been swimming".Even when abuses were reported, they were frequently ignored. In 1931 the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane received complaints of one nursing sister beating children "black and blue". She remained in the job for another 20 years.Sexual abuse, often violent, was frequent for both boys and girls. Children were raped and violated by supervisors, teachers, priests, nuns, and bigger boys. In 1973, a senior child care officer reported three rapes at a single institution. At another, a boy was tied to a bed, raped by a priest, and beaten by the orphanage's Mother Superior for lying when he named his assailant.Life, if anything, was worse at Government reform schools.Inmates at Westbrook Training Centre were frequently and violently thrashed, at times with sexual overtones. One described a supervisor who prowled the dormitories at night: "There was no doubt in my mind that he enjoyed flogging boys. These floggings were always administered publicly and always on the naked buttocks."One child received at least 40 lashes with a belt for stealing a carrot from a field, and afterwards was forced to kiss a guard's boots. Another boy's face was scarred from a beating in which his head was smashed against a tin wall and kicked on the ground.A former inmate told Forde's inquiry: "It was hell, from the moment you walked in the door. Beatings, the food, the floggings, the path [a punishment walk], the kangaroo hopping, the compounds, the work conditions, the showers, the clothes - everything ... I still carry the scars."Forde's 1999 inquiry concluded that despite vast improvements, problems remained in Queensland's detention centres and residential care facilities and that there was still potential risk of abuse to children in care.She said blame went beyond individuals."Some measure of responsibility must be taken by those to whom abuses were reported and who did not act, those in charges of the institutions who did not have sufficient safeguards in place to protect the children, those members of religious organisations who turned a blind eye, staff and management who did not adequately monitor children in their care, successive State Governments that have not sufficiently valued children to adequately resource the department entrusted with their care, and society, which ignored or accepted what happened to children in the care of the State."As a State we must face up to past wrongs and make proper redress, and make sure that when children are in our care we do them no harm."It is a message reinforced by Lizzie Walsh's new allegations.