AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 February 2014
The Salvation Army reacted with disbelief and suspected people were money-grabbing when they began receiving complaints about abuse in their homes for children, the royal commission into child abuse heard on Tuesday.
Major Marina Randall, who with her husband Major Clifford Randall blew the whistle on extreme abuse by two Salvation Army managers at a Queensland home for boys, said there was a naivety in 1999 about the handling of abuse allegations.
She was giving evidence at a hearing into how the Salvation Army Eastern Territory responded to allegations of child abuse at two homes in Queensland and two in NSW.
Randall and her husband were house parents at Alkira Home for Boys in Indooroopilly in Queensland from 1973 to 1975.
The then young couple were shocked at what they witnessed – a regime under Captain Lawrence Wilson and then Captain John McIver in which children were brutalised.
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