UK’s child sex abuse inquiry finally opens as children sent to the colonies begin testimony almost three years after the probe was launched

By Martin Robinson
Daily Mail
February 27, 2017

https://goo.gl/dV7ECn

Shame: Chidren head to Australia after the Second World War to start new lives - some of the hundreds who would be abused will give evidence as the UK's child abuse inquiry starts today

Delays: The £20million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has been plagued with delays and is already on its fourth chairworman, Professor Alexis Jay, pictured, since it was set up by Theresa May in 2014

New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard dramatically resigned as chair of the troubled inquiry into child sex abuse last year

Baroness Butler-Sloss (left) and Dame Fiona Woolf (right) both stepped down from the role as head of the child sex abuse inquiry after concerns about their links to the establishment

The controversial public inquiry into child sexual abuse will start today and hear harrowing accounts from victims sent to the colonies after the Second World War.

The £20million Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has been plagued with delays and is already on its fourth chairwoman since it was set up by Theresa May in 2014.

The inquiry will draw together a staggering 13 different probes, including investigations into alleged abuse at Westminster, in children's homes, within the Anglican and Catholic churches and by alleged abusers such as Lord Greville Janner.
Today it begins by considering the physical and sexual abuse suffered by hundreds of children sent abroad after the war - some were falsely told that their parents had died.

Most of the children were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and what was then Southern Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe.

Eight of these children will give evidence to IICSA chairwoman Alexis Jay over the next week.

Statements from other victims will be read out and some will give evidence via videolink from as far away as Australia.

Some of the evidence will centre on the molestation and rape of boys in facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, including one notorious home in Western Australia.

Victims were also 'ritually' beaten with belts, canes and hockey sticks at homes and schools run by the Fairbridge Society, with one child suffering a broken back and spending three years in hospital.

In 2010 then prime minister Gordon Brown apologised to the children for their ordeal but was unaware of the systemic sexual abuse they suffered.

He wrote recently:  'Hundreds of children — already far from their family and country — were also abused in the children’s homes and orphanages to which they were sent. Indeed, we now know some church and charity leaders came from Australia to Britain to handpick British boys for their own gratification through systematic molestation.

“It is clear that at least in the mid-1950s, and probably from 1947, governments did have evidence that abuse was happening and did nothing.”

David Hill, who has waived his anonymity, says the British Government failed the children it allowed to be sent abroad.

He was sent to Fairbridge Farm in New South Wales in 1959 with his two brothers.

In his written submission he said: “The British government and the UK Fairbridge Society did not take sufficient care to protect children at the Fairbridge Farm school.

'Both should have been aware of allegations of sexual abuse of children at the Fairbridge Farm school at Molong. Both were aware of some allegations of abuse neither took appropriate steps in response to the allegations of sexual abuse,” he said, according to the Guardian.

Lynda Craig said life at Fairbridge Farm for children can only be compared to slavery.  

The child migration programmes were large-scale schemes in which thousands of children, many of them in the care of the state, were migrated to parts of the British Empire by various institutions in England and Wales, with the knowledge and approval of the British government.

Evidence will be heard from expert witnesses about the history and context of the child migration programmes and from the Child Migrants Trust, which supports former child migrants.