A former resident of Turana Youth training centre, a home in Victoria for children placed into state care, has told a royal commission she was sexually abused by a staff member after she sought to escape repeated abuse by another resident.
The witness, identified only as BDB, was raised as a boy but said she identified as female from about the age of 14. BDB said she was not open about this and did not begin living as a woman until she was an adult and had left care.
BDB said she was moved between foster carers and state-run centres from the age of seven, before being placed at Turana, a facility for boys who were wards of the state or juvenile offenders, in 1965, when she was 14.
She was placed in a dorm with an older boy who frequently came into her bed at night and fondled her, BDB told the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse on Tuesday.
“One night, I banged on the door and yelled out that I needed to go to the toilet in order to avoid [him],” BDB said. An officer she knew as Mr Jones came to the door and unlocked it, BDB told the commission.
“Once we were out of earshot [of the other boys] I told Mr Jones what he [the boy] had been doing to me and asked Mr Jones if I could be moved. He told me that it wasn’t possible. Instead, he took me into the staff tearoom and said words to the effect of, ‘You just sit with me, we’ll wait for him to go to sleep’. Mr Jones then exposed his genitalia to me and encouraged me to touch them.”
BDB said she never told anyone else in the centre about the abuse. Attempts by the royal commission to locate and identify Mr Jones had so far been unsuccessful, the commission heard.
“There was a culture in Turana that if you told on someone, you would get a beating,” BDB said.
BDB continued to be moved between care homes and boarding houses throughout her childhood, the commission heard, at times running away to escape the abuse and to avoid being physically harmed by boys. She was always returned by police to the homes.
At 15, BDB said, she spent several months in a boarding house in Hawthorn, where she was sexually abused and raped a couple of times a week by an adult resident of the house.
“I was a 15 year-old child in a house full of adults.” BDB said.
“Eventually I bought a large knife and threatened [him] with it when he came into my room one night,” she said. “[He] never visited me again after this.”
BDB was discharged from state care in 1968 illiterate and with no life skills, such as cooking, she said. She could not sleep unless there was a light on, she said.
BDB said she got married at 26 and had children with her wife, but that the marriage broke down after 27 years because her history of abuse meant she did not know how to give or accept love.
“When I tried to cuddle my children, sometimes my memory of other people’s attempts at cuddling me would emerge,” she said, at times shaking as she gave her evidence. “These are memories I want to forget.”
BDB said she was now happily married to her husband and had worked hard to educate herself, undertaking a degree in social work. She was also passionate about educating others about the potential harms of moving children in and out of care.
“When I was doing my social work degree I found many reports that described the care that we had as being toxic, as being dangerous,” she said.
“Some children would go through up to 30 placements. I found being rejected from one foster carer traumatic and dehumanising. Can you imagine that happening four or five times, can you imagine that happening 30 times?
“I reckon if children don’t show behavioural problems after that experience, then I’d be concerned about them.”
BDB said government funding should be directed towards rehabilitating and educating poor parents so that their children could avoid being placed into foster care or having a “government agency as a parent”.
“‘I believe that passing children around from one foster carer to another is a form of abuse,” she said.
For the next fortnight, the commission hearings at Melbourne’s county court will focus on children abused while living as wards of the state in institutions run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The hearings continue.
