Actor tells of abuse by Salvos

Daily Mail (UK)
October 7, 2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/aap/article-3263091/Salvos-urged-step-abuse.html

Actor Jack Charles says he was bashed, sexually abused and regarded as "item of interest" during his time in a Salvation Army boys' home in Melbourne.

Mr Charles has told a royal commission that he was put in the Box Hill home as a "social experiment" as one of the stolen generation who was taken from his mother when he was four months old.

"I certainly think the home whitewashed me," he said.

"I left Box Hill a devout Methodist and without a sense of my Aboriginality."

Mr Charles said staff members at Box Hill hit boys in the face with a closed fist for punishment and that he was sexually abused by both staff and other boys.

He said one staff member abused him at least 20 times, possibly more, while certain boys would "regularly have their way with me".

"I was regarded as an item of interest as I was the only Aboriginal boy in the home," Mr Charles said.

"They would threaten me with beatings unless I did what they wanted and I was frightened of being bashed if I tried to refuse."

Mr Charles, whose film credits include The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and this year's feature film Pan, spent 12 years at Box Hill and still feels some gratitude to the Salvation Army for feeding and educating him.

The 72-year-old received both compensation and an apology from the Salvos, but said he was very unhappy with its reference to alleged offences.

He urged other people to come forward and tell their stories, describing the process as cathartic.

In other evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Wednesday, a former resident of a Salvation Army children's home in Perth told how she was beaten, humiliated and sexually abused.

The 57-year-old cannot be identified but detailed her treatment at the Hollywood Children's Village at Nedlands from 1969 to 1972.

She said she had trouble with bed wetting as a child and as punishment a staff member would rub her face in the wet sheets.

"I was also forced to wear wet underpants on my head with the crotch part over my nose," she said.

The woman told how she was locked in a boiler room and one day thrown into a slop bin used to hold food for pigs.

The commission also heard that the South Australian government knew of allegations of child sex abuse at a Salvation Army boys' home in Adelaide dating back to the 1940s, including some incidents investigated by police.

Among them was a report in 1963 that a live-in domestic worker at the Eden Park home was disturbed by sudden and violent screams at night and noticed that the bed sheets of some boys were blood-stained.

There was also an incident in 1940 when a Salvation Army ensign was jailed for indecent conduct and another in 1982 when a social worker suspected three boys had been sexually abused.