AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
January 29, 2014
Paul Bibby
Court Reporter
Raymond Carlile’s little brother was so hungry he had started eating grass.
After months of being fed scraps of fruit and vegetables that were intended for farm animals at a Salvation Army boys’ home in Queensland his wasn’t the only stomach that was grumbling.
”They kept a load of raw potatoes under the building and we used to go under there and steal them when we were hungry,” Mr Carlile, now in his 70s, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Tuesday.
Mr Carlile’s story is just a tiny glimpse of the deprivation and abuse suffered by scores of young boys at the hands of the Salvation Army at boys’ homes in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the commission heard.
In his opening address, counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, set out horrific allegations of brutal sexual and physical abuse in which boys aged 6 to 17 were raped and forced to have sex with each other under threat of extreme physical violence that included being flogged, beaten and locked up in cages for up to nine days at a time.
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