AUSTRALIA
SBS
AAP
A stock whip wielded by a young man paints bloody stripes across a small boy’s bare back while several nuns and dozens of children watch on.
Another boy is locked in a cramped cupboard for an entire day without food or water.
His crime? Wetting the bed.
A nun drags another child to the priest’s quarters and tells him to be a “good boy”, before the man who has supposedly committed his life to god forces him into unspeakable acts.
These are not scenes from a film, but the reality for Queensland children who attended St Joseph’s Neerkol orphanage, near Rockhampton.
Former Queensland governor Leneen Forde’s 1998-1999 inquiry into institutional child abuse exposed the Neerkol nuns’ decades-long reign of terror, which was only brought to an end by the orphanage’s 1978 closure.
Now, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse public hearing has revealed the full horror of what went on in the dormitories, the yards, the dining halls and the priests’ quarters not so long ago.
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