Girl ‘jumped to her death after beating by nun’
A GIRL jumped to her death from the fire escape of a Catholic orphanage after being beaten by a nun, an inquiry heard yesterday.
The girl aged ten or 11 jumped because she had ‘taken too much of a beating’ from the nun at Nazareth House in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, witness Anne Marie Carr told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.
Miss Carr, now aged 64, said the nun ‘had taken her up the stairs and battered her, told her to go to her bed. We were still out playing.
‘Somehow the fire escape was open. She must have taken too much of a beating and threw herself out the front of the building.’
She added that the other children were outside playing when the girl, who had been disciplined for failing to come in from the playground, fell to her death.
The inquiry, being held in Edinburgh, also heard that during Miss Carr’s time at the home between 1965 and 1967 she was violently punished by a nun and staff for wearing her ‘convent clothes’ to a party at school. She said that children’s heads were ‘banged off the lockers’ and they were ‘kicked in the back, kicked in the face’, adding: ‘We were screaming, but they didn’t stop.’
The inquiry has heard previously that Miss Carr’s brother Sammy, who may have been malnourished, was allegedly beaten by a nun at Smyllum Park in Lanark days before his death at the age of six in 1964.
A medical expert told the inquiry in December last year that while a physical attack was not the cause of his death, it was ‘a question of the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
Instead it was likely that Sammy succumbed to an infection – possibly from a dead rat.
Yesterday another former resident at Nazareth House in Kilmarnock, who cannot be named but used the pseudonym Steve, told how a member of staff tried to sexually abuse him.
Steve, who was born in 1959 and was at the care home between 1968 and 1970, said a worker at the orphanage tried to abuse him when he was ten. He told how one membecause ber of staff tried to force him to touch him inappropriately but he refused. He said: ‘I seen it happen a few times (to others). I reported it to the nuns.
‘All they said was, “Don’t tell anyone else, we will sort this out”, and the priest reassured me this would be sorted.’
Steve added that police were not involved but after he told the priest and the Mother Superior, he was ‘shipped off ’ to another home in Newcastle, separating him from his brothers, who later blamed him for leaving them behind at Nazareth House.
Steve also said nuns made him wear shoes on the wrong feet they pointed inwards. He said: ‘When they saw my toes were going in the way, they made me switch my shoes and walk up and down the hallway.
‘They made me walk up and down the hall with my hands on my hips on my tiptoes. The moment that my heels touched the ground, I was hit.’
Another witness, who gave evidence anonymously but used the pseudonym Janice, was born in 1953 and went to the Kilmarnock home in 1961.
In a statement read out to the inquiry, she said it was like a ‘haunted house’.
Janice, who had learning difficulties, said one of the nuns slapped her and ‘called [her] every name under the sun’ including ‘brazen hussy’. On one occasion, she was caned by a nun for making a mistake while Highland dancing, when she accidentally kicked the swords on the floor.
The inquiry, currently looking at children’s homes run by the Sisters of Nazareth, heard last year that the order is facing more than 400 allegations of abuse.
Sister Anna Maria Doolan, regional superior of the Sisters of Nazareth, said in June last year that the order was ‘very sorry’ for any child who suffered abuse.
The inquiry, before Lady Smith, continues today.