CANADA
CBC News
By Laura Glowacki, CBC News Posted: Mar 27, 2017
In a case with striking similarities to testimony made by residential school survivors, two Indigenous adult women say they were repeatedly sexually abused by clergy at a Catholic day school in Manitoba they were forced to attend as children.
And now they’ve launched a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of St. Boniface, as well as the two now-deceased men they say were responsible, the province and other defendants.
Both women — one now 67 and status Indian, the other a 63-year-old Métis woman — attended the same elementary school in Bloodvein, Man., about 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg, from about 1956 until the mid-1960s.
The complainants say the same two men fondled and raped them as children beginning when they were seven and six, respectively.
“One of them was a priest. He held certain powers over them,” said the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Israel Ludwig. “They thought they would be damned if they made a complaint.”
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