By Geoff Strong
The Age
May 22, 2009
http://www.theage.com.au/national/generations-of-child-victims-shown-no-mercy-20090521-bh7a.html
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| Susan Hyland reflects on painful childhood memories at her Coffs Harbour home. Photo by Frank Redward |
IT WAS only after her mother found her with a smashed, bleeding face that Susan Hyland finally escaped the care of Dublin nuns known as the Holy Angels.
Now 57, she lives alone in the New South Wales town of Coffs Harbour, looking back on her life as an emotional disaster.
After a nine-year investigation commissioned by the Irish Government, a report released this week has confirmed the extent of abuse in Catholic Church-run reform schools in Ireland, with thousands of stories of routine beatings, rapes and humiliation.The 2600-page report paints the most damning and detailed portrait to date of abuse by priests, nuns and lay staff from the 1930s to the 1990s.
The investigation uncovered previously secret Vatican records demonstrating church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks back to the 1930s.
But while complaints were made, many government and church officials failed to act, instead punishing children who complained, while transferring perpetrators elsewhere.
Thousands of abuse victims including Ms Hyland fled Ireland as soon as they were old enough to move overseas. Several hundred travelled back to Ireland from the US and Australia to tell their stories to the commission.
Many priests and lay brother emigrated too, and Australian authorities have had to deal with at least five of them who continued their abuse here.
The report found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order.
Girls supervised by orders of nuns suffered far less sexual abuse but endured assaults and humiliation.
Even after nearly 50 years, Ms Hyland chokes back tears remembering her two years and four months in the Glenmoroon Boarding School in Dublin.
She was the third of 12 children to a devout middle-class couple. At the age of six she hit her head while playing, had a seizure and needed constant medication.
Three years later, her mother was told by health authorities to place her in the boarding school so she could receive proper care
There she became known as child number 683 and, after bursting into tears on arrival, was given her first beating by the mother superior.
She says one nun used to beat her at least once a day, often until she bled. In one instance she was tied to a chair using the nun's rosary beads when she refused to eat something she detested.
"I wasn't allowed to see my mother for a year. When I finally saw her and told her what was going on, she refused to believe me. The bruises all over my body were explained away by the nuns as me being clumsy.
"Finally one day she and my brother came to visit and they found me in the sick bay after my face had repeatedly been bashed into a wall. We found our way out the convent's back door and just ran like hell."
Aged 12, she had not learnt to read or write in the nuns' care and soon left school for a series of menial jobs, before emigrating to Australia at 19. She later found she had contracted tuberculosis in the convent.
"My whole life was damaged by the nuns and I have never been able to trust or love.
"I have had two children from two failed marriages and only recently was I able to tell my daughter why I was unable to do some fairly normal things."
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