Rubane House "like Hell upon Earth" for 69-year-old Branded a Liar for Reporting His Abuse As Boy

By Harriet Crawford
Belfast Telegraph
October 7, 2014

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/rubane-house-like-hell-upon-earth-for-69yearold-branded-a-liar-for-reporting-his-abuse-as-boy-30643584.html

Rubane House was a Catholic children's home in Kircubbin

A former resident of a Catholic children's home stayed silent about the horrific abuse he suffered as a 10-year-old boy for more than half-a-century after he was branded a liar when he first tried to raise the alarm.

The witness, now 69, described his eight years at Rubane House as "like Hell upon Earth" in evidence to the Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) inquiry into child sexual abuse at the home in County Down yesterday.

The four instances of his sexual abuse at Rubane began in 1955 when he was just 10. In the first occurrence he was asked how he was settling into the house before having to "fight off" a Brother who attempted to rape him. He said that he knew that what the Brother was doing was wrong – "even as a child it was something I wouldn't want to do".

The same Brother attempted to rape him again, as well as taking him out of his bed in the boys' dormitory to sexually abuse him. The witness described the fear he felt going to sleep, in case a Brother would come to wake him up for abuse.

Three years later, in response to a county welfare officer asking why he kept running away from the home, he tried to tell him of the sexual and physical abuse he suffered from the Brothers.

The witness reported that the officer branded him a liar, "talking and shouting at him for 20 minutes".

He told the inquiry: "He told me to shut up, that I was telling lies. He as good as called me a liar. He said those were religious men and that they would not do that."

The officer did not take any action in response to his claims, the inquiry heard.

"That scared me off altogether from ever telling anybody else about it, because he didn't believe me. I just kept it all to myself... I suppose I was thinking all along that no one was going to believe me anyway. I bottled it up for years after."

He told the inquiry that it was not until 2010 that he was able to get help for the psychological effects of the abuse. "I blamed myself for a long time for what had happened to me," he said.

Between 1951 and 1985, about 1,000 children stayed at Rubane, near Kircubbin on the Ards Peninsula, a voluntary home for boys aged between 11 and 16.