AUSTRALIA
International Business Times
By Barsha Baruah on April 15 2015
A first person’s account of a child sex abuse inquiry revealed she was reportedly raped “well over 100 times” by a priest at St. Joseph’s Neerkol Orphanage Rockhampton in central Queensland. ABC News reported that The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found out that the children were treated brutally at the orphanage.
Meanwhile, in a previous investigation it was found that hundreds of children were sexually abused, beaten and forced into hard labour there. In fact, the orphanage has always been under numerous police and government inquiries, one notably being by the former Queensland governor Leneen Forde in 1999.
The Royal Commission, which is monitoring how the institutions such as schools and churches dealt with allegations related to child sexual abuse, will hear evidence from 18 witnesses for the next two weeks. Among the 18 cases, 13 are from the former residents of the orphanage, who were abused there between 1940 and 1975.
Listen In To Couple Of The Witnesses
A witness named AYB narrated her experience of being sexually abused by a former priest at the orphanage, Father Reginald Basil Durham. She told the investigation that her abuse began when she was only 11. She said, during Father Durham’s visit to the family home on Christmas Eve, he started taking advantage of her sexually. She, not only felt powerless and robotic but also felt enslaved.
When he kissed her, she said, “He was a smoker and the taste was horrible.” But he told her to keep everything secret.
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