Another Maltese reports beating for reporting abuse in Australian institutions

Times of Malta
April 30, 2014

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140430/local/another-maltese-reports-beating-for-reporting-abuse-in-australian-institutions.516979

Raphael Ellul

A Royal Commission in Australia has heard more shocking evidence by Maltese men about the abuse they suffered from Christian brothers when they were orphan boys.

The commission, meeting in Perth, is investigating institutional responses to child sexual abuse.

The West Australian newspaper said hundreds of boys at the Bindoon, Tardun and Castledare institutions were beaten by day and raped by night.

Orphaned or distanced from parents unaware of their plight, nobody could hear the screams.

And those who did hear them refused to save them.

Young Raphael Ellul, who was at Tardun, made it all the way to a police station in Mullewa, only to be clipped over the ear by the local officer, who told him, "Don't tell lies about good Christian men".

Another Maltese boy wrote a long letter detailing the abuse and secretly slipped it to a visiting dignitary from Malta.

He waited to be saved but it never happened.

That same boy, after being beaten unconscious trying to flee his first rape in the "lion's den" of Brother Simon at Tardun, must have thought he had escaped when he woke up in a hospital bed, the newspaper reported.

With a drip in his arm, head injuries and bloody underpants, surely he would find someone to protect him?

"As I opened my eyes, I saw the face of a woman with a nurse's hat on," he told the inquiry yesterday. "She said, 'Don't worry, you are at the Mullewa hospital'. I have no idea of how long I was knocked out for but it was afternoon.

"I felt a bandage around my head. The nurses told me I'd had a fall. While I was in the hospital, my pyjama pants had to be changed often because I was bleeding.

"I told the nurses what happened to me and that something had been put in my backside.

"The matron came to me and asked to repeat what I'd told the nurses. She walked away afterwards and said nothing. I learnt later that her name was Matron Barden and that she was the sister of Monsignor Barden, who often visited Tardun."

The boy was sent back and endured more years of abuse, for ever scarring him. He remains trapped. He and the other witnesses have not escaped, each telling in heartbreaking detail the psychological impact of being sucked into a depraved world where the powerful tormented the innocents.

They and their families have lived with the nightmares for decades yet all but one Brother, who was jailed for three years in the 1990s, went to their graves without paying for their crimes.

The men are demanding compensation from the church.

But Mr Ellul said it was too late for him. "I am damaged goods," he said.

"Justice has not been done."