UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Caroline Davies
Wednesday 13 July 2016
The Church of England has offered a “whole-hearted apology” to hundreds of emotionally disturbed adolescent girls placed at a church-run children’s home where residents were drugged, locked up and physically and sexually abused over a 20-year period.
A review published on Wednesday presented “harrowing” findings about Kendall House, in Gravesend. It found vulnerable teenagers were over-medicated on psychotropic drugs and tranquillisers to control them, locked in isolation rooms sometimes for days, and in some cases raped, during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Evidence showed the home was “on the whole, toxic and destructive to the girls placed there”, the report concluded.
Warnings about behaviour at the home, run by the dioceses of Rochester and Canterbury, went unheeded for decades, and the church’s initial response was “woeful and inadequate”, said Prof Sue Proctor, who led the review and wrote the report.
The Rt Rev James Langstaff, Bishop of Rochester, who commissioned the review, said he was “appalled and saddened” to learn of the pain suffered by those at the home, which cared for 325 teenage girls from the 1960s until its closure in 1986.
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