Girl held in ‘cooler’

Ex-pupil of approved school tells of ordeal

A FORMER pupil at a Dundee girls’ school has told an inquiry she was forced to spend days in a seclusion room as punishment.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard evidence from Rizzo, a pseudonym, who was at Balgay Approved School in the 1970s when she was around 12 years old.

Originally from Glasgow, she was sent there by a children’s panel after getting into trouble for stealing.

During her time at the Dundee establishment, Rizzo said she would “run away at every opportunity” to get back home to her dad.

And it was this behaviour, she said, that led to staff restraining her and sending her to a seclusion room which was nicknamed “the cooler”.

She said: “On most occasions when I ran away in Dundee I was brought back by the police.

“They would take me through the big front door and into the head teacher’s office.

“(The staff) would hold me down and I had to be physically carried to the cooler.

“There were other staff members involved but it was the cook I remember because she was huge.

“I could not breathe when she was on me. My whole body would ache.”

Rizzo described feeling like she had been “forgotten about” when she was sent to the cooler, adding that no one would speak to her when she was there.

She told the inquiry: “It was outside of the main building and it had no windows.

“It was almost like going into a stables.

“A lot of the time I was taken there because I was running away.

“I spent days and days in the cooler and I would sometimes pray not to wake up.

“The only thing I could do was sleep and count the bricks in the room – I had to do something to keep me sane.

“I was brought food but it was just left. No one would speak to me.

“I suspect they had forgotten I was there.”

Balgay became an approved school – a residential institution for young offenders – in 1933 and housed scores of girls at a time.

The inquiry has previously heard from another former pupil who said she was raped by a staff member there when she was a teenager.

Lynn, who attended Balgay Approved School for Girls in the early 1960s, spoke about her torment for the first time as she gave evidence at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry.

She was sent to Balgay after her mother accused her of stealing money.

Lynn, who was around 15 at the time, said: “He asked me if I wanted to come down to his flat and I never thought anything of it. But he took me through to the bedroom, took my clothes off, and raped me.

“He was maybe 25 to 30 years old and he was married. I ran down the stairs and he ran after me.

“He said something along the lines of just forget about it and we went back to the school.”

Lynn told the inquiry the same staff member raped her on two occasions at Balgay.

She added: “I never reported what happened until now really.

“I just wanted to get something off my chest.”

The inquiry also heard from

Petrie, another pseudonym, who detailed the abuse they suffered at the Burnside Assessment Centre on Harestane Road in Dundee.

They had previously spent time in a children’s home in Perthshire after being taken into care aged four, before being sent to Burnside in the early 1980s.

Giving evidence from behind a screen, Petrie told the inquiry they were hospitalised during their time at Burnside after being raped by staff members.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry was established in 2015 to look into the cases of abuse of children in care in Scotland.

BALGAY APPROVED SCHOOL: ‘The only thing I could do was sleep and count the bricks – I had to do something to keep me sane.’