How Could You? Hall of Shame-Australia-Woodlands Boys Home
This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.
From Wallsend, New South Wales, Australia, “an ”organised ring” of paedophiles believed to include Anglican and Catholic clergy used a Sunday afternoon ”children’s Christian program” in the 1970s to sexually abuse boys at a church-run Wallsend boys home.
”These men just came, got the boys, used them, and put them back,” said a Hunter woman whose husband has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse he was sexually assaulted by multiple offenders at Woodlands Boys Home.
The United Protestant Association has issued an unreserved apology for the ”tragedy” of what occurred to child sex victims at Woodlands, where some of the smallest and youngest boys were targeted by the Sunday group.
”From what the victims have told us, these men changed from week to week, suggesting a larger, organised ring,” UPA general manager Steve Walkerden and after-care support worker Graham Hercus said on Friday.
”We are aware of a group of men who did come to the home in the 1970s for a number of years on a Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to conduct a children’s Christian program, but who routinely took smaller boys into downstairs rooms in the building and abused them.”
Anglican priest Peter Rushton – acknowledged by the church in 2010 as a sexual abuser of children – and ”volunteer carer” and convicted child sex offender Robert Holland, are believed to have taken boys from the home, or to have had links with Woodlands.
The UPA confirmed it investigated allegations that another ”volunteer carer” from Germany sexually abused about 10 boys in the 1970s before leaving Australia in the 1980s to return to Germany where he is believed to be living.
The wife of the former Woodlands boy who has detailed his abuse to the royal commission wept as she spoke about the powerlessness of orphaned and vulnerable children at the home, some as young as four years old.
”It was like buying a bottle of milk to them [the sex offenders],” she said. ”If you don’t like it, put it back. Get another one, put it back.
”If the boys reported what happened, they were flogged. My husband can still hear it today, the screaming of the boys when they were taken downstairs and flogged for saying what had been done to them.”
The woman recalled visiting Woodlands with Rushton, now deceased. ”Rushton went there all the time and got boys out,” the woman said. ”We’d go for choir and when we’d leave in his car, we’d have one of the boys with us. He died and got away with it.”
A man who was at the home in the 1960s has told the royal commission he was 13 when he was repeatedly raped by a driver who visited Woodlands. When he reported the first rape to a matron he got a ”backhander across the face”.
A few days later, he reported the rape to his teacher and principal, who contacted Woodlands and was told: ”It is just a lonely little boy looking for attention.”
”When I got back to the home, I got a tanning,” he told the royal commission.
The UPA has paid compensation and provided support to a woman for repeated sexual assault over a six-year period at its girls home, Ellimatta, at Maitland in the 1970s.
Mr Walkerden and Mr Hercus said the offender was believed to have been a casual gardener.”
Lifelong impact of harm at UPA institutions ‘a tragedy’
The United Protestant Association was ”fully supportive of every effort to bring to light what is clearly a shameful and disgusting part of Australia’s recent history”, general manager Steve Walkerden said.
The UPA ”unreservedly” apologised on Friday to children harmed while in its care and detailed its knowledge of appalling abuse of children at the Woodlands and Ellimatta homes over nearly four decades. The abuse of children as young as four and the lifelong impacts of that abuse were a tragedy, Mr Walkerden said.
”We unreservedly apologise to those who were harmed as a result of the time spent in a UPA home,” he said. ”We are committed to open communication with any former children who lived at Woodlands or any other home run by UPA.
”We have a dedicated after care worker who is able to offer access to records. UPA is willing to make reparation payments to those who were abused. We have reported all known matters to police and work co-operatively with them.”
UPA received the first abuse allegations at Woodlands in 1998, and has paid reparation to some victims.
Group was ‘always short of funds, struggling to get suitable staff’
Woodlands Boys Home at Wallsend was the third of 13 United Protestant Association homes which cared for nearly 540 boys aged four to 17 between 1944 and 1981.
The UPA’s Ellimatta Girls Home at Maitland provided similar care for girls from 1945.
Many children were placed in the homes by court order; others were placed there voluntarily by parents, usually because of marriage breakup or the death of a partner.
United Protestant Association general manager Steve Walkerden said Woodlands, like virtually all homes that housed about 500,000 people who spent some or all of their childhood in institutional care in Australia, was ”always short of funds, struggling to get suitable staff, and dependent upon the charity of the local Newcastle people”.
”All our homes tended to depend a lot on volunteers who took the boys out for the weekend or school holidays,” Mr Walkerden said.
The UPA now runs an aged care centre at the Wallsend site.
The UPA’s foster care service for about 40 children and young people on the far north coast worked closely with government departments and professionals to ”provide the care needed by children in our service”, Mr Walkerden said.
”We maintain two case workers per child with separate workers for the child and the carer.'”
Paedophile ring used boys home
[Sydney Morning Herald 9/23/13 by Joanne McCarthy]
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