Government response to decades of abuse at homes 'woefully inadequate': lawyer

A lawyer heading up a class-action lawsuit over theNewfoundland Training Schools says the children housed therewere treated more like animals than people up to and including being sent to a veterinarian for medical care.

The evidence that has been collected from the 60 or so former residents at the government-run homes inWhitbourne, Pleasantville andSt. John's indicates that sexual abuse happened in the institutions for decades, with a "woefully inadequate" response from government, said lawyer Lynn Moore at a media conference Monday.

"They were horribly mismanaged and they had no basic respect for human dignity," Moore said of the Girls' and Boys' homes. "They did not treat these children as children."

The class-action lawsuit was certified Friday at the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador. The 90-day noticing period has begun, which lets the public know about the class action, and provides potential claimants an opportunity to opt into it.

About 60 people have been identified as potential claimants, with three representative members, but the true number won't be known until everything is done, Moore said. About 1,200 children were housed in theNewfoundland Training Schools, according to the government. The class action covers the period between 1973 and 1989, and further action for residents from the 1950sto 1973 is also being explored, Moore said.

It's possible that there may be victims from the years after 1989, she said, but most of the former residents involved so far are men. Knowing that women and girls are statistically more likely be the victims of sexual abuse, said Moore, it's likely there are more female former residents out there.

Decades of abuse accusations

The class-action lawsuit begins in 1973 because of a legal change in the way government is sued, and ends in 1989 because that was the year the Hughes commission on the Mount Cashel abuse scandal ended, Moore said.

However, she said, both the accounts of former residents and existing government records and court cases indicate that abuse in the government-run homes began decades earlier, she said.

In the 1950s, for example, children living in the home in Whitbourne were sent to a veterinarian for medical care when they were injured.

"They were literally treated like animals," Moore said. The vet was later convicted of abusing the boys.

Not many documents from the 1960s exist, she said, but former residents have said that they were punished by being held down while naked and beaten with a leather strap a significant escalation of the guidelines for corporal punishment even in those times, which called for no more than five hits on the hand.

These children were deemed less than.- Lynn Moore

In the next decade, members of the public made complaints about the homes to VOCM'sOpen Line. Another man was eventually convicted of sexually abusing boys at Whitbourne, which meant there were two decades the 1950s and the 1970s in which a government inquiry was being held into abuse at the homes that found no abuses by staff, at the same time as abuse that would later result in a criminal conviction was happening, Moore said.

A November 1983 report from Sharon Callahan, a social worker, pointed to "grave concerns" about the treatment in the homes, Moore said, two months before a boy who ran away from the Whitbourne home froze to death on the railway tracks.

Testimony given during a subsequent inquiry into the boy's death indicated that additional workers weren't called in to look for the missing boy because of an overtime policy one more piece of evidence of the government's lack of care for the children entrusted to them in these homes, Moore said.

"These children were deemed less than," she said of the Girls' and Boys' homes residents. "They were not deemed worthy of basic human rights and basic human protections."

Next steps

Though Moore said the plaintiffs are open toa settlement butright now the lawsuit is proceeding as if it will go to trial.

She said she can't say what might considered a satisfactory amount of money for the former residents, but added that the people affected deserve to be compensated: for their pain and suffering, for lost income, for any counselling or treatment they have needed in the past or will need.

"'We're definitely talking millions of dollars," she said. "Tens of millions, Iwould suggest."

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