Three charities in firing line as report highlights catalogue of child abuse

A DAMNING report on failures that led to the abuse of children at three Scottish charities is to be published tomorrow.

The critical findings of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) on Barnardo’s, Quarriers and the Aberlour Child Care Trust run to nearly 200 pages.

SCAI chairman Lady Smith will publish the conclusions of a ‘case study’ which focused on all three organisations, the latest in a series of interim reports.

The £27million inquiry itself is ongoing and starts again next month, when it will resume scrutiny of child migrant schemes, in which youngsters in care were sent abroad and then abused.

Barnardo’s, the UK’s largest childcare charity, has faced a series of allegations that children in its care were beaten and raped.

In January last year, the charity claimed there had been no ‘malice’ in its mistreatment of children – as it formally apologised to those abused in its homes.

Former Barnardo’s executive Sara Clarke, who became a consultant for the charity, helping it tackle historic allegations of child abuse, said Barnardo’s was ‘deeply sorry’ for any ‘hurt’ children in its care had suffered – and accepted it had been responsible for ‘failures’ that led to abuse.

But Mrs Clarke claimed care failures had been caused by the ‘practicalities’ of looking after large numbers of youngsters in homes.

In 2018, Kate Dowdalls, QC, read a statement on behalf of Quarriers,

saying she was ‘instructed first to reiterate the unreserved apology that was offered to survivors of abuse on May 31, 2017, at the outset of the hearings during phase one of this inquiry’.

She added: ‘Quarriers acknowledges children were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse whilst in their care.’

Also, in 2018, Steven Love, QC, for Aberlour, offered an ‘unreserved apology’ to survivors.

Detail of the content of the report has not been released but the Mail understands it will contain highly critical findings.

We revealed in December 2018 that all three charities were the subject of police investigations into allegations of abuse, which are still ongoing.

The SCAI was launched in 2015 and aimed to ‘shine a light in the dark corners of the past’.

It began its first public hearings in 2017 and has heard evidence from a number of organisations accused of abuse, including the Catholic Church, which admitted that some paedophile priests were sent away to be ‘fixed’ at a hospital in Ireland.

Some of Scotland’s top private schools, including Gordonstoun, in Moray – attended by Prince Charles – and Edinburgh’s Fettes College, where Tony Blair was a pupil, are under investigation this summer. An earlier interim SCAI report, published in October 2018, said children at two Lanarkshire care homes run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul were sexually abused and beaten. Seventeen people were arrested or reported to prosecutors.

Outlining the future work of the SCAI, Lady Smith said: ‘In 2020, we plan to progress to case study hearings in relation to our investigations into abuse in boarding schools. I would encourage anyone who has evidence to offer in relation to any of the investigations listed on our website to get in touch.’

The SCAI can be contacted by email, talktous@childabuse inquiry.scot, or on 0800 0929 300.