AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
January 30, 2014
Paul Bibby
Court Reporter
Some boys knew it as ”the cage”, others ”the lock-up” – a small cell with iron bars built into the door. And for youngsters at the Salvation Army’s Riverview Training Farm in Queensland it was a place of dread.
Some of those who broke the rules at the institution were placed in the dark space by the Salvation Army officers charged with their care and kept there for days and even weeks, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard on Wednesday.
”One day me and two other guys did something wrong – I forget what it was – and we were put in the holding cell,” one former resident, known as ES, told the commission. ”It was a room like – it looked like it had a door and iron bars on the front, just like your normal cell.”
The man, now in his 60s, said boys were forced to sleep on the floor of the tiny room without a pillow or even a blanket. ”We went to the toilet in a bucket.”
It was a chilling tale from a day when painful recollections overflowed. As the commission dug deeper into the abuse of boys who attended homes run by the Salvation Army in NSW and Queensland, four former residents from Riverview gave evidence of extreme sexual and physical abuse, and the alleged failures of police and welfare agencies to intervene.
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