MONKS STOLE MY CHILDHOOD WITH HORRIFIC ABUSE
EVERY morning I wake up in a cold sweat, the memories of what happened at school fresh in my mind. For two years during the 1980s I was regularly beaten, assaulted and tortured at my boarding school, Fort Augustus Abbey School in Inverness-shire.
I was barely 14 years old when I went there. Now I’m 43, but I live with the impact of the abuse I endured there each day.
That’s why the report from the McLellan Commission is so demeaning to survivors like myself. It’s insulting. It feels like a whitewash and there’s no other way around it. It’s a PR exercise to keep people on board.
As for the Catholic Church’s apology – I don’t want an apology read out at Mass by Archbishop of Glasgow Philip Tartaglia. I want them to admit what they did to me.
I had my childhood taken away. It was stolen from me. I was tortured, beaten, imprisoned. I was tiny when I went to Fort Augustus. I was a 14-year-old child, the smallest in the school. And I talked back so they hated me.
The Catholic Church talks about an apology – well they never said sorry to me. Not in any meaningful way. They never said ‘how can we help you put your life right?’ They can’t even get the basics right.
When I was at school, I would be put in a room and it would be locked or the door left open. If I tried the door a monk would come in and beat me.
It was like a game to him. Other times I’d be locked in a room called the tower. But it wasn’t like Rapunzel; far from it. Something bad happened to me in that room.
The beatings I took were horrendous. The humiliation was horrendous. From day one, to be subjected to horrific, sexualised behaviour and assault, it was grotesque. Everything about it was grotesque. I was also aware that the other pupils were preyed upon and abused, physically and sexually. In general, the school was a very aggressive, threatening and dangerous place to spend key years of my childhood in.
The whole thing was a nightmare, a living hell. I can’t take any of that back – it’s about the future now, for myself and others. But being a survivor is not a badge of honour, it’s a purgatory. The people who have come forward are all brave men but there are only a few.
I know guys who have taken their own lives because they couldn’t take it any more. Like many survivors, I repressed my memories for years and pursued a successful career as a senior prison nurse. But around three years ago I began having vivid nightmares which i nvolved scenes depicting abusive events I had experienced at the school. Then I began getting flashbacks. These flashbacks feel very real to me and I am transported back to those terrible moments at school.
IhAVEN’T been able to work for two years because I have severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I too have attempted suicide several times. I am lucky I am alive. But what we want – myself and other victims – is proper justice. And it’s for us to decide what justice is. We believe that is substantive reparations on our timetable. We want compensation and full accountability. Our guys are dying of old age or they’re taking their own lives. It’s wholly unacceptable to us.
There are whole paragraphs about theology in the McLellan report and it is nonsense. Most of it is irrelevant. I don’t have any faith now. how can I? I’ll have faith when the Catholic Church shows its worth and pays compensation to the victims of abuse.
I believe that the Catholic Church owes a duty to support adult survivors like myself to deal with the consequences of childhood abuse experienced in institutions it operated.
As such, I have not received any support from the Church.
The report refers to us as ‘ angry survivors’. It’s shameful and insulting. We are so much more than that. Being abused makes you feel like a leper in society. It’s why so few of us have spoken out, and it takes its toll on those of us who have.
The people of Scotland have got to stop watching from the sidelines. They have to step up and support survivors. You have to help because we need to end this. We need to end the pain for the guys who are still alive now and realise some justice quickly.
Ultimately, I just want to be able to live my life without thinking about the past, and what happened to me. I want them held to account in every way possible. It breaks my heart that this could happen to another child. I want to make sure that never happens.