Witness: I was beaten by nuns and raped by helper at orphanage
A FORMER resident of the Nazareth House children’s home has told how he was repeatedly raped by a male helper.
He said he was too ‘scared’ of the nuns at the orphanage to report the attacks – after seeing children ‘slapped and battered’.
The man, known as John, told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) that helper Peter Blaney sexually abused and raped him in a dormitory at the home in Lasswade, Midlothian.
John, who was born in 1959 and was at the institution from 1969 until 1970, said he was groomed then raped by Blaney.
But he was afraid to speak out and only told police about the sexual abuse in the late 1990s, when his own children were grown up.
John previously stayed at a home in Aberdeen, run by the same Catholic order, the Sisters of Nazareth, which he described as a ‘concentration camp’ where children were ‘slapped and battered about’ by nuns.
He told the inquiry that after moving to Lasswade, his head was ‘stoated off the wall’ by a priest when he was an altar boy because a button on his tunic was undone. John also said he still had scars from when a nun hit him with an ‘aluminium bar’.
Blaney sexually abused him at Lasswade and raped him on three occasions. After one attack, John told the nuns he had been badly injured but did not reveal the reason. No medical help was given and ‘nothing was done about it’.
John said he was ‘scared’ of the nuns’ response and by the time he told police of the abuse, other allegations had been made against Blaney.
Blaney was 53 when he was jailed at the High Court in Glasgow in 2000 for regularly abusing two vulnerable brothers – in care after the break-up of their family – between August 1969 and February 1972. Meanwhile, John also told the SCAI hearing in Edinburgh that a ‘little boy’ was accidentally dropped into a scalding hot bath by an 11-yeargirl who had been assigned to look after him. The boy ended up in hospital.
Another witness, known as Anne – born in 1962 and at Lasswade from 1969 to 1976 – recalled being tied with cords to a chair and force-fed.
On another occasion, a nun kicked and slapped her until she fell on the floor – then beat her with a chair until it broke.
During the attack, which Anne believed left her ‘black and blue’, a song was coming from the record player – All Kinds of Everything, sung by Dana, which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970. Anne said hearing it always reminds her of her ordeal.
In another incident, Anne said the same nun ‘slapped me across the face and I fell down a flight of stairs’.
She added: ‘I was unconscious. I had to go to hospital and I kept slipping in and out of consciousness, and she [the nun] kept punching me and telling to me to wake up.’
Anne said that when she was 12, a nun watched as she was beaten on the bottom with a wooden spoon by a woman who worked at the home.
She said: ‘The nun told her to stop hitting me on the bottom, to hit me at the bottom of my back, my coccyx, a good few times – that was very sore... The nun just stood and watched.’ Anne told how she still has scars from the attack, and suffers nightmares and ‘flashbacks’.
Another witness, also known to the inquiry as John, was born in 1951 and was at Lasswade periodically between 1953 and 1961.
He said he lost contact with his older brother, who was also at the home, after the Mother Superior told him he had been put into ‘isolation’.
John did not see him again until after he was married, in his late teens – when they met by chance on an Edinburgh bus. By this time, John said, ‘the bond was broken’ but they did return as adults to the orphanage, then being used as an old folks’ home.
He said they were looking for photographs and records but the nuns said there were none, telling them: ‘I know you boys went through a bad time.’
Giving evidence from behind a screen, John said he and others who wet their beds were given cold baths and told to ‘scrub your sins away’.
He said it was a ‘bad regime’ and nuns used belts, sticks and even rosary beads to mete out physical punishment to children. John added that he was also force-fed.
The inquiry, before chairman Lady Smith, continues.
‘The nun kept punching me’