UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Steven Morris
Monday 3 July 2017
In 2008 the former children’s home Haut de la Garenne on Jersey became a focus of global attention when police discovered what they believed to be fragments of a human skull.
The building, at that time a youth hostel, was dubbed “the house of horror” as scores of other bone fragments were unearthed and lurid reports surfaced that shackles, restraints, “punishment rooms” and a bath stained with blood had been found. The fear was that children, perhaps many, had been tortured and killed and their remains concealed.
To some degree, it was a false alarm. Towards the end of the year police said they did not believe any murders had taken place at Haut de la Garenne. Of the 170 bone fragments found, analysis showed only three could be human and they probably dated back centuries.
However, the investigation, codenamed Operation Rectangle, did unearth a terrible scandal. It brought to light a catalogue of abuse – sexual, physical and psychological – at Haut de la Garenne and other Jersey children’s homes stretching back to the end of the second world war. …
The serial abuser Jimmy Savile was among those accused of attacks at Haut de la Garenne and at a home on the island run by French Catholic nuns, the Sacre Coeur orphanage. Wilfred Krichefski, a Jersey senator and TV executive, now dead, was also named as an alleged abuser.
Physical and psychological abuse ranged from having mouths washed out with carbolic soap to being beaten with stinging nettles, the inquiry heard. Some of the abuse was carried out by older children with the blessing of staff.
One man said senior boys used a generator to administer electric shocks to younger children and threw darts at them. A girl is said to have been punished by having to spend a night in a room with the body of a dead nun.
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