I was beaten by nun wielding cricket bat
...and my brother was raped by priest, says victim
A FORMER orphanage resident has told an inquiry a nun beat her with a cricket bat – and her brother was raped by a priest.
The witness, known as Cheryl, recounted her ordeal at the Nazareth House children’s home in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, from 1968 to1970.
She said: ‘The use of a bat to hit us was the main form of punishment – I remember a small cricket bat and a tennis bat.
‘I just recall kneeling in the corridor, waiting to be punished, a lot.’
Cheryl, who was born in 1961, said one of the nuns beat bed-wetting children – and her brother told her he had been raped by a priest.
She also told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI), in a statement read to an Edinburgh hearing yesterday she believed she had been sexually abused by a nun in the middle of the night.
Witness Paula Chambers, who waived her right to anonymity, told the inquiry her ‘life had been stolen’ during her time at Nazareth House in Cardonald, Glasgow, in the 1980s. The 45-year-old said that a nun sent her to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France to get rid of a ‘mental illness’.
Mrs Chambers said: ‘She said, “It’s a holy shrine where people go”. I asked, “What’s wrong with me?”. She said, “You’ve got a mental illness. If you go to Lourdes you will be cured”.
‘I thought I was all right. It was a pilgrimage of people that had something wrong with them.’
Mrs Chambers added: ‘She told me I was in there because I was a bad child, my mother couldn’t cope with me. I was evil, she said to me on a few occasions.’
She said another nun was a ‘light’ to her and a ‘mother figure’, but the overall experience at the home, she said, was ‘very, very bad’. She added: ‘It’s destroyed my life. I’m left with mental health that I can’t control.
‘I was a happy child, now I’ve got four or five things wrong with me. I just feel like my life has been stolen from me.’
The Nazareth House homes were run by a Catholic order called the Sisters of Nazareth.
The inquiry heard last year it was facing more than 400 allegations of abuse.
Meanwhile, inquiry chairman Lady Smith said yesterday her report on the Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark will be released ‘in early summer’.
It was run by another Catholic order, the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. Allegations of abuse at the home were explored by the inquiry in a previous phase, ending earlier this year.
Former residents of Smyllum told the SCAI how nuns beat them, forced them to eat vomit and ritually humiliated them for bed-wetting.
One claimed a fellow child may have died after being left naked in the rain for three hours as a punishment.
The inquiry continues.