AUSTRALIA
7 News
By Miranda Forster
April 14, 2015
A former resident of a central Queensland orphanage has told a national inquiry how nuns administered public floggings and forced bed-wetting children to stand with soiled sheets draped over their heads.
Retired nurse Mary Adams, 64, suffered repeated emotional, physical and sexual mistreatment at the hands of nuns and priests at the Neerkol orphanage near Rockhampton in the 1950s and 1960s, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard.
Sobbing uncontrollably at times, Ms Adams told the hearing in Rockhampton she was punched, slapped, pulled by her hair and on one occasion flogged with a skipping rope so forcefully she struggled to walk for days.
Boys who tried to run away from Neerkol were publicly flogged with horse whips and those who wet the bed were forced to stand with the soiled sheets draped over their heads.
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