UNITED KINGDOM/AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
By Australian Associated Press
Child migrants kept being trafficked from Britain to Australia despite officials knowing that some institutions they were sent to harboured pedophile rings, a U.K. inquiry was told.
Dr Margaret Humphreys of the Child Migrants Trust told the child sexual abuse inquiry in London that recruiters were sent to the U.K. to select children for church and charity-run farm schools in Australia.
‘We would categorise that now as child trafficking,’ she said on Friday.
The inquiry is examining the sexual, physical and emotional abuse suffered by thousands of children in care who were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Rhodesia up to the 1970s.
Among the worst offenders were the Catholic order the Christian Brothers who ran farm schools in Western Australia and the royals-backed Fairbridge Society which ran farm schools in NSW.
The inquiry has heard from former child migrants that say they were routinely sexually abused and flogged by staff, were poorly fed, clothed and educated and used as virtual slave labour on the farms.
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