Police knew about care home abuse

MOIRA TOLD COP OF BEATINGS… AND GOT CANED

A WOMAN who says she was one of at least 118 abuse victims at a council-run home claims she alerted police 50 years ago but they failed to stop it.

Moira Lowman, 60, says she was sexually abused and beaten by staff at Beecholme Children’s Home in 1968.

She said she told a police officer about repeated attacks on her and several of her friends – but was punished when staff at the home found out.

The Sunday People told last week how 118 people have come forward to claim they were physically and sexually abused at the home in Banstead, Surrey, between 1957 and 1974.

Vulnerable

The “children’s village” was where some of London’s most vulnerable youngsters were sent, supposedly to give them a better start in life.

Police have now launched a probe which they say could take four years to uncover the horrors they endured.

But Moira, who believes her own abusers are now dead, says those responsible could have faced justice five decades ago if officers had taken her seriously when she and some of her friends spoke up.

She said: “There was a policeman who used to direct the traffic outside our high school in nearby Cheam. We complained to him about how the staff at the home hit us.

“He came to the home and spoke to them. After he left, we got called into the office and got slapped on our bare bottoms with a cane.” Mum-of-three Moira, who has waived her right to anonymity, said she heard nothing more from the police after her beating. “They got away with it. They could do what they liked,” she said.

The Sunday People has seen Moira’s care records which document numerous injuries sustained while at the home.

She was just four when she was taken aken into care in 1961 from her family home in Ladbroke Grove, West London. Social workers had been concerned her parents could not cope after the sudden death of her sister. She spent a deca decade at Beecholme and c claims she was regularly beaten by staff and se sexually molested by one of the “uncles” who ra ran one of the houses.

She claims he would touch her while s she was in the bath and made

her ex expose