Catholic brother beat 150 boys in mass punishment
A FORMER pupil at a boarding school run by a Catholic order yesterday told how a religious brother meted out beatings to around 150 children.
Richard Kozub said youngsters were made to wait in a line while the teacher used a strap for the mass punishment.
Mr Kozub, 71, told an inquiry he waited at the end so that the brother at St Joseph’s College, Dumfries, would be tired out before he reached him. Describing his time at the school between 1957, when he was nine, and around 1963-64, Mr Kozub said: ‘I hated every single second.’
He was also sexually abused by one of the brothers who ran the school, and told his mother about the ordeal. She wrote to the school and met a senior brother who ‘assured her the matter would be dealt with’. But Mr Kozub said the abuser continued working at St Joseph’s for six years.
The witness told a hearing of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in Edinburgh that when pupils banged the table in the dining room to celebrate good news being announced, a brother ‘took exception to this and then belted 150 pupils’.
Mr Kozub said one time he was taken into an attic room after a ‘minor misdemeanour’ when he was nine. He said a religious brother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, sat on a bed opposite and told him to take off his trousers before sexually abusing him.
Mr Kozub said he then ‘belted me over the backside’.
On another occasion, a brother who Mr Kozub said was a ‘sadist’ chased him around a dormitory when he was nine, ‘lashing the back of [his] legs with a belt’, after he refused to be belted.
Mr Kozub said he feared a ‘cadre of perverts’ at the school communicated about boys who could be targets for sexual abuse.
He added: ‘I was aware that I got unwarranted attention.’
The former art dealer, who lives in Edinburgh, reported his abuse to police in 1997, but the investigation came to an end when it emerged one abuser had dementia and another lived abroad.
The inquiry was told yesterday the order is now under police investigation, and that two former staff members, who cannot be named, had been convicted of child abuse.
Another witness, ‘Jim’, 70, said he was sexually abused by a religious brother who told him his mother had given him permission to teach Jim about the ‘facts of life’.
The inquiry continues.