Care home children ‘regularly abused’

VULNERABLE CHILDREN were routinely abused by men appointed “house fathers” at the notorious Shirley Oaks care home in south London, an inquiry has heard.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) heard children as young as two were physically assaulted at the Lambeth Council-run home.

This section of the far-reaching inquiry is examining whether there were child protection failures by public authorities in the area, including the Met Police and Lambeth Council.

On Wednesday, the panel heard evidence from three former residents of the home between the 1960s and the 1980s.

The first witness said she was thrown into a table so hard by the house father that it broke.

“I remember very clearly, and he threw me into the table and my eye split,” she said.

“It was stitched up, and then, two weeks later, it was done again, and it was stitched across that way again.”

The man in question claimed she had been trying to do a handstand, even though she was only two-and-a-half at the time.

The witness described being sexually abused by the house father, who would get into bed with the young girls claiming he was checking to see if they had wet themselves.

“This is going to sound really weird, but it just felt normal because I didn’t know it was wrong,” she said.

“It just felt that that’s what happened. It didn’t feel wrong because I didn’t know it was wrong.”

As well as physical and sexual abuse from the house father, the witness was regularly verbally abused by the house mother and had her hair cut off as a punishment for playing with it. She would tell me that I’m nothing. She would call me a bastard all the time,” the witness said.

The Lambeth strand of the inquiry is due to conclude on July 31.