Redressing Institutional Abuse of Children

K. Daly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137414342
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137414359
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Christine M. Alder Book Prize in 2015 from the Australian and New Zealand

 Society of Criminology

Historical abuse of children is a worldwide phenomenon. This book assesses the enablers of abuse and the reasons it took so long for officials to respond. It analyzes redress for institutional abuse in two countries, Canada and Australia, using first-hand accounts of survivors' experiences.   

Part I

The Problem

1

Discovering Institutional Abuse

Mount Cashel beginnings

On Monday, 13 February 1989, St John’s radio host Bill Rowe received a call to his morning talk show program, ‘Open Line’.¹ It was from Steve Neary, a colleague of Rowe’s during their years together in politics. On air, Neary said that in a 1979 inquiry, testimony was given of a cover-up in 1975 when the police investigated sexual and physical abuse of residents at Mount Cashel, a school for boys in St John’s, Newfoundland. Interviewed later, Neary said he had no idea that his phone call ‘was going to set up such a chain reaction. In my wildest imagination, I did not think there were such goings-on ... at Mount Cashel ... I was completely shocked, the same as everybody else in Newfoundland’ (Harris, 1990, p. 262).

That day, Katherine Caddigan, who had listened to the show, rang Associate Deputy Attorney General of Newfoundland and Labrador, Robert Hyslop. She demanded that a public inquiry be conducted of cover-ups in the 1975 Mount Cashel investigation. Hyslop recalled that he had ‘heard rumours’ about the school, but thought they were confined to ‘strapping of children’ for which charges had not been laid. He told Caddigan that it was ‘long in the past’ and he was unable to do anything about it. Another listener was to have a more decisive impact, the wife of the Honourable John Mahoney of the Newfoundland Court of Appeal.

The next day Hyslop received a phone call from Mahoney, who asked whether Hyslop could verify the allegations of a cover-up at Mount Cashel, which his wife had heard on the radio. Hyslop recalled that Mahoney asked him, ‘was there anything sexual involved?’ (Harris, 1990, p. 263). Hyslop said that he thought the allegations concerned ‘over-zealous strapping’ but was unsure because he had not seen the police reports. According to Hyslop, ‘as a result of [the judge’s] query and my inability to provide detailed answers to him, I decided to investigate further’ (Hughes, 1991, p. 184).

According to Hughes, ‘Hyslop then engaged in a flurry of activity with momentous consequences’ (p. 179). He requested police reports, written in the mid-70s, related to alleged abuse by the Christian Brothers at Mount Cashel. Upon reading a report dated 18 December 1975, he learned of ‘sexual abuse by at least three brothers on a horrifying scale ... the amount and type of which boggles the mind’ (pp. 180–1). However, the report had subsequently been altered in March 1976; it contained fewer references to sexual abuse, although some witness statements remained. Hyslop showed the material to others that day, including the Director of Public Prosecutions, a staff member in the Special Prosecutions Unit, and the Deputy Minister. They then met with the Minister of Justice, advising her that there ‘were strong indications of sexual abuse charges, including confessions having been given by at least two brothers’; further, they concluded that the offences ‘were not statute barred and ... we should re-open the investigation’. The Minister concurred, and Hyslop ‘phoned the Chief of Police on the afternoon of February 14, 1989, and advised him to re-open the matter and that a letter would follow’ (p. 185). In his letter to the Chief, Hyslop said:

It is clear in my mind that at least one person committed over 100 individual indecent acts on at least 15 boys. Having discovered this horrifying fact on February 14, 1989, what cause of action is open to us? (reproduced in Hughes, 1991, p. 182; emphasis added)

Believing that ‘we cannot ... let this lie fallow’ (p. 182–3), Hyslop asked:

Where are these offenders? Who else is at risk? Who else has been molested by these people? Where are the victims of the crimes that these people perpetrated? Will they give evidence? Who ordered this investigation [be] terminated and why? (p. 183)

He concluded by stressing ‘the need for urgent action on this file’.

This is the start of Mount Cashel, which was a turning point in Canada’s history of responding to institutional abuse of children.² Although Canada was among the earliest countries to respond, other jurisdictions were beginning to take allegations of institutional abuse seriously. In related developments in the United States and Ireland, sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in community and residential settings became the subject of intense media attention, civil litigation, and criminal prosecution (beginning in 1984 in the United States and 1994 in Ireland; see respectively, Lytton, 2008; and Keenan, 2012).³ The 1980s was a turning point in how state and church authorities decided to respond to a problem that had been known to exist for many decades.

Mount Cashel was among the earliest cases, but not the earliest, with criminal prosecution and convictions of adults (in this case, Christian Brothers) for sexually abusing children (in this case, boys) in their care. In December 1982, David Burton (a brother) pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve 4 months for sexually abusing a boy on many occasions over a year at Mount Cashel. On appeal, his sentence was reduced to time served (12 days). A year before, in 1981, three care workers in Northern Ireland – William McGrath, Raymond Semple, and Joseph Mains – were convicted of sexual offences against 11 boys in their care, from 1960 to 1980, in the Kincora Boys’ Home in East Belfast. Their sentences were 4 years (McGrath and Semple) and 6 years (Mains). Belfast police were aware of what was occurring in the boys’ home in the 1970s, 6 years before they arrested the men in 1980 (Dorman and O’Cleirigh, 2013).

Like the Kincora case, the cases in this study have a longer history and an earlier starting point. In Mount Cashel, there were police investigations of sexual and physical abuse in 1975 conducted by Detective Robert Hillier. Although two Christian Brothers had admitted to sexually abusing boys at the time, no charges were laid. A ‘deal’ had been struck between the police and Department of Justice, under pressure from the Christian Brothers, to halt the investigation. In 1979, during an inquiry into a suspicious fire, a copy of Hillier’s 1975 report had been leaked to the media, but the story had no momentum. In 1982, there were more investigations at the school, this time of older boys who had sexually victimized younger boys, but these were not pursued because the police did not want to lay charges against the residents.

In 1988, James Hickey, a priest in the Archdiocese of St John’s, was convicted of sexual assaults against teenage boys, which he had committed over 17 years. Highly publicized, Hickey’s case brought forward allegations against five other priests, who had been serving in the Archdiocese and two, who had been ‘living in a lay state within the Archdiocese’ (Winter, 1990, p. 1). The offending did not occur at Mount Cashel, but in the priests’ residences.⁴ However, these cases contributed to a general awareness of the problem, particularly for boys who had been former residents at Mount Cashel and who had reported their experiences of abuse to the police in 1975. One of them was Shane Earle.

When Earle heard that the Mount Cashel investigations were re-opened, he decided to go to the police. It was 16 February 1989, late in the evening when he gave his statement, which detailed abuse from the age of 6 when he first entered Mount Cashel in 1973, to age 19, when he left in 1986.⁵ Harris (1990, p. 270) reports that when Earle gave his statement, he was ‘weeping uncontrollably at times’; and when recounting the cover-up in 1975, he told the detectives that he and other boys felt a sense of betrayal, that society ‘had shut the door on us, and society didn’t really care about what happened to the kids at Mount Cashel’ (p. 270). Shane Earle was the first Mount Cashel survivor to give a statement to the police.

Publisher and editor-in-chief of the St John’s weekly, The Sunday Express, Michael Harris was following developments when the investigation re-opened; and on 12 March 1989, his strongly worded editorial called for an inquiry into ‘the deal’ between the Christian Brothers and Department of Justice. Earle read it, and later said to the Hughes inquiry that ‘finally somebody knows what they’re talking about, finally someone’s not talking in circles any more’ (Harris, 1990, p. 272). Earle talked with Harris about having his story published in the newspaper; and after considering the consequences, he decided to write about what had happened, which was published in two parts on 19 and 26 March 1989. Harris reports that it ‘went off like a bomb’ (p. 274). Now there was a human face to Mount Cashel: that of a 6-year-old boy being sexually abused by a Christian Brother. What was Shane Earle looking for? In part 2 of his Sunday Express story, he said,

I’m just looking for a lot of answers. Why this went on? Why nothing was said? Why there was no counselling? And why there was no guidance? Mount Cashel was supposed to be a place for boys. But it turned out to be hell on earth. (p. 275)

In 1989, Earle appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, where he said he lit a fire in the basement of Mount Cashel, hoping that the building would burn down (Weisblott, 2011).

On 14 April 1989, the province announced the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Response of the Newfoundland Criminal Justice System to Complaints, chaired by the Honourable Samuel Hughes, a former member of the Ontario Court of Appeal. It was the first inquiry into institutional abuse of children and its handling by state authorities in Canada, and among the earliest of its kind.⁶ Three weeks later, in response to the James Hickey case and others of clergy abuse in the St John’s Archdiocese, Archbishop Alphonsus Penney established a Special Commission of Enquiry into Sexual Abuse of Children by Members of the Clergy, chaired by the Honourable Gordon Winter, former Lieutenant Governor of the province.⁷

During 1989–90, the Hughes inquiry and police investigations were occurring at the same time. This created ‘a sense of incompletion [in] the proceedings ... of dire and unfinished business’ (Harris, 1990, p. 366) because none of those alleged to have committed offences was called to answer questions at the inquiry. (This would come later with prosecutions and convictions in the 1990s.) A total of 31 former Mount Cashel residents participated in the inquiry. Some were later interviewed by the Institute for Human Resources Development (IHRD) (1998), who reported that they ‘found it an extremely distressing process’ and that Hughes ‘was not sensitive to [their] needs, cutting them off or not allowing them to say what they wanted’ (pp. 72–3). Rather than televised hearings, which ‘made it into a circus’ (p. 15) and ‘put them on display’ (p. 72), some would have preferred to speak more privately with Hughes. On 31 May 1991, Hughes submitted his two-volume report to the government; it was released nearly a year later, on 24 April 1992, after the first set of trials concluded. Hughes said that the police should have laid charges in 1975, and he inferred that a Department of Justice official had a ‘consultation’ with the assistant or police chief to cease the investigation (Hughes, 1991, p. 209). He recommended several approaches to recompensing victims, but these were not taken up by government officials; rather, victims would have to prove their case in court.

Shane Earle, who filed a law suit in 1989, settled for an undisclosed sum with the Christian Brothers and the province in 1995. Shane’s brother settled soon after. Two major civil settlements were reached in 1996 and 2004, each taking 7 to 8 years; and on 23 May 2013, a third major settlement was announced.

Ripple effects

Mount Cashel was important in the evolution of responses to institutional abuse of children: not only was it the first response in Canada, the Hughes inquiry was watched on television by many.⁸ It was also the subject of a two-part television series, first aired in Australia in 1993, The Boys of St Vincent. There are several examples of the ripple effects and connections of Mount Cashel to the other cases.

One is its relationship to St John’s and St Joseph’s (Ontario). David McCann, who would become the leader of a victims’ advocacy group, Helpline, learned about the Hughes inquiry when watching the television news. He followed the inquiry closely, having himself been abused at St Joseph’s School. At the time, he told his mother about it, and she relayed it to a probation officer; however, it was ‘either rejected or ignored’ (Henton and McCann, 1995, p. 91). On 4 November 1989, McCann rang the Hughes Commission office; and although it was nearly midnight, Counsel David Day was in the office and answered the phone. McCann asked him whether the inquiry could address abuse incidents that occurred outside Newfoundland, making reference not only to his experiences, but also to those of ‘other boys, his chums, [who were] mistreated at St Joseph’s’ (p. 91). David Day said, no, he could not, but that McCann should tell the police or a lawyer in Ontario. McCann decided instead to call a journalist, and in time, he met journalist Darcy Henton, who began to investigate McCann’s claims. Henton visited the Archives of Ontario and came across a notation to an inquiry into St Joseph’s School in 1960, and he decided to file a Freedom of Information request for the documents. Months later, in March 1990, he received documents that detailed internal investigations of sexual and physical abuse during 1958–60, none of which had been reported to the police. His efforts would ultimately lead to the government re-opening the case in 1990. At the close of his book with Henton, McCann says ‘to the boys in Newfoundland: thank you for your courage and for leading the way’ (p. 298).

A second is the relationship of Mount Cashel to Child Migrants, one of the Australian cases. For background, the British and Australian Governments established a policy in 1912 to transport ‘immigrants of good sound British stock’ to Australia (Child Migrants Trust, 2013). (Children were also sent to other Commonwealth countries, including Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia [Zimbabwe]). About 7,000 children were sent to Australia, and about half, to Western Australia. In Alan Gill’s book on Child Migrants, he reports that when The Boys of St Vincent aired in Australia in August 1993 (and again in June 1996), audiences noted ‘its marked similarity to alleged events at Western Australian orphanages run by the Christian Brothers’ (Gill, 1997, p. 516). He said that a former Child Migrant rang him ‘as the [television] credits were rolling’, and told him, ‘it’s like history repeating itself. I know it was in Canada, but I could swear it was Bindoon. I felt I was there’ (Gill, 1997, p. 519).

This strong sense of connection between experiences of abuse in Western Australia (Bindoon was a receiving institution for Child Migrants), Newfoundland (Mount Cashel), and Ontario (St John’s and St Joseph’s) can be been traced to how the Christian Brothers ran these institutions and others under their control. However, the commonalities run deeper: when reading across the cases, survivors’ stories of abuse are remarkably similar. Mount Cashel and Child Migrants show that while the reasons that children were placed in institutions differed (British children were sent to Australian institutions as a result of a policy between two governments, and Mount Cashel boys were state wards or voluntarily placed by parents), once in an institution, children’s experiences were similar. This comes from living in a total institution.

Total institutions

Erving Goffman (1961) created the concept of ‘total institution’ after spending a year in the mid-1950s as a fieldworker in the St ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Setting the Context
• Part I  The Problem
• Part II  The Response
• Appendix 1: The Cases
• Appendix 2: Redress Scheme Application and Assessment Process
• Appendix 3A: Redress Scheme Elements and Outcomes
• Appendix 3B: Financial Payments, Validation, and Other Case Data
• Appendix 3C: Financial Payments, Adjusted for 2012, in Different Currencies
• Appendix 4: Public Apologies and Statements
• Appendix 5: Memorials and Commemorative Activities
• Appendix 6: Other Media
• Notes
• References
• Cases and Legislation
• Index