Children in Victorian state-run youth facilities were forcibly given contraceptives, raped and abused by staff members in charge of their care, and forced by staff to strip naked during terrifying and degrading “medical” examinations, the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has heard.
Over the next fortnight, the commission will hear from 10 victims abused across three institutions managed by the Department of Health and Human Services in Turana, Winlaton and Baltara. However, 200 victims had come forward about abuse that had occurred across numerous care facilities across the state, the commission heard.
The commission will hear evidence they were raped by staff and other children, subjected to electric shocks, and had their abuse ignored by senior institutional staff and Victorian police, with victims sometimes punished for coming forward, counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer said in her opening address.
One victim, identified only as BHE, would give evidence that when she arrived at Winlaton as a 15-year-old, she was strip searched by a male officer, who “felt her all over”, Dwyer said.
“This experience was terrifying, degrading and embarrassing,” Dwyer said. “She was also subjected to intrusive venereal disease checks.”
Another victim, Karen Hodkinson, was as a 14-year-old made to sit in a chair, her legs in stirrups, while she was examined internally, Dwyer said, and she was also groomed and sexually assaulted by a social worker.
When Hodkinson told the officer in charge about the abuse, she was slapped across the face and called a “dirty lying little bitch,” before being locked in a cell where she was forced to sleep on the floor, the commission heard.
The commission will also hear from a victim identified only as BGD, who was 15 years old when she was placed in Winlaton after telling social workers her father was raping her. Staff gave her contraceptives, the commission heard, and sent her home with her mother and father for weekend visits.
“BGD was raped by her father for 27 years,” the commission heard. “She gave birth to four children fathered by her father and suffered two miscarriages. She is expected to give evidence that she felt the department protected her father and his feelings, and held her partially responsible for the rapes.”
Most of the children had been taken from their parents because of neglect, the commission heard, and it was common for them to be placed in institutions that also served as correctional facilities for juvenile offenders.
Norman Latham, who will be the first to give evidence, was placed into care at age 15 because he was deemed likely to “lapse into a career of vice and crime”, the commission heard.
“He is likely to tell the commission that he was sexually abused 19 times by two senior officers at Turana,” Dwyer said.
Dwyer said Latham ran away from Turana, and when he told Victoria police what had happened, they returned him there and told one of his abusers, Eric Horne, what he had said.
“Mr Latham is expected to say that later that night, Mr Horne said to him, ‘I told you not to say anything’ and raped him in the infirmary at Turana,” Dwyer said.
Horne was now dead, the commission heard. The case against his other abuser was dismissed by the Victorian director of public prosecutions in 2014 four days before trial, because there were no reasonable prospects of conviction and it was not in the public interest, the commission heard.
Another victim, Robert Cummings, will give evidence that he was sexually abused at age 16 by an older boy he shared a cell with in a correctional facility. When Cummings told a staff member about the abuse, the officer told him it was happening because he was a homosexual who needed to be cured, Dwyer said.
He was then taken to Royal Park hospital where a doctor administered electric shock treatment to “cure” his homosexuality, she said.
“I anticipate that these former residents will give evidence that as children they were sexually abused, some by institutional staff members, some by social workers from various predecessors to the Department of Health and Human Services, and a number by other child residents,” Dwyer said.
“Some survivors will give evidence that they disclosed sexual abuse to institutional staff members, social workers of the department, and/or Victoria police, but were not believed or were punished, or received a response that did not protect them from the abuser.”
These repercussions made other victims too fearful to come forward, she said.
Leonie Sheedy, the head of the Care Leavers Australia Network victims advocacy group, said the fortnight of hearings was the first time wards of the state would have their stories heard in a public hearing.
A Victorian government inquiry into the handling of child sexual abuse by institutions, which handed down its findings in 2013, had not examined those who were abused in government-run orphanages, Sheedy, whose organisation represents almost 1,000 people abused in care, said.
“Until now, governments have ignored this,” she said. “Year after year, people have died never able to tell their story, so this is a very big day for the thousands of state wards.”
The hearings continue.
