Laat horen die stemmen! ‘These are the voices that need to be heard’

DAVID LEASK
The Herald - Scotland's Leading Quality Daily Newspaper:
"Sorry. Elizabeth McWilliams is sick of the word. She said it when she was lied to. She said it when she was beaten. She said it when she was raped aged nine.

Now she thinks it's time somebody else apologised.

Ms McWilliams was one of the children - their number simply unknown - who were physically, sexually and emotionally tortured in Scottish care homes. And then told they had only themselves to blame. Yesterday she sat through the first independent report into Scotland's 'national shame', a half-century of abused youngsters whose cries for help were ignored."

"I hope society can now accept this once and for all," Ms McWilliams, 70, told the report's author Tom Shaw. "I hope I am going to get an apology."

The Shaw report - officially titled Historical Abuse Systemic Review - was not the full-fledged public inquiry Ms McWilliams and hundreds of fellow campaigners had wanted. It was certainly not an apology. But it remains the biggest public acknowledgement of children's suffering to date.

Mr Shaw, a former teacher and schools inspector from Northern Ireland, named no names. Nor did he hazard a guess at the scale of the abuse in the period he covered, 1950 to 1995. Instead he gave voice to the unheard. A whole chapter of his report was devoted to the words, anonymous but strong, of those who survived abuse.

One of those voices was Ms McWilliams. For around 16 years, from 1939 to 1954, she lived - and suffered - in the Quarriers Village in Bridge of Weir, a Christian community of cottages, each with their own mother and father, that was supposed to replace the horrors of mass orphanages.
The cottage parents, however, expected some gratitude from Ms McWilliams, then little Elizabeth Miller, and her fellow residents. Their story is typical of those abused, but always made to feel guilty on behalf of their abusers.

"All my life I kept apologising," she said last night. "Please, please, please, I am so sorry, I would say. That's why I don't like the word.

"I had such low esteem. We were children but we were told we were worthless good-for-nothings."
Ms McWilliams came to Quarriers at one.

She arrived with a twin brother, but was separated from him. "He was put in Cottage nine, for the boys. I was in Cottage 11."

She only learned that the boy, Archie, was her brother when they were, she thinks, about 12. "A teacher let it slip," she said. "But we were still not allowed to talk.

"It was a really religious place. The boys and girls went to church together, but the boys came in one door and the girls another. I never got to know my brother. We have no relationship."

She can't be exactly sure that she found out about her brother when she was 12. Age was always tricky. "We never knew our birthdays," she explained. "We only knew our age by the jobs we were doing. When I was five I was the bedroom girl. When I was 15 I was the kitchen girl."
They could count on Christmas, of course, but not on Christmas gifts. "I wanted Fair Isle gloves," she said. "One year I asked for them. You would say what you wanted and you would get a slap. Think again,' I was told. A bible would suit you.' Next year I got a hymn book. I couldn't read. I was blind in one eye but only got glasses when I was eight and a half."

When she was nine - or thereabouts - she was raped by the man Quarriers called her house father. "He took his chance," she said matter-of-factly.

Some children complained of abuse. That had consequences. "Boys," she said. "Well, they were hung up on door hangers and their penises tied to doorhandles."

Her worst abuse? "Having no identity," she said yesterday. "To be told, wrongly, you were an orphan. To be lied to as a child, not even being able to dream about belonging to anybody. I don't belong to anybody or any place. It's a terrible feeling."

Quarriers was just one of many institutions where children were abused. Nobody knows the scale. Records are lost - "scattered", said Mr Shaw. No-one even knows for sure how many institutions there were from the 1950s to 1990s that looked after children, many the orphans of the men and women who fought for Britain in the war.

David Whelan, however, believes Quarriers is a special case, deserving a study, a public inquiry, in its own right, such was the horror of its regime. He said: "It was not a care ethos. It was an abuse ethos."

Mr Whelan was at the Bridge of Weir village from 1969 to 1974, between the ages of 10 and 15. He kept silent about the abuse he suffered, until he was asked, by the wife of a man under investigation for child abuse, to serve as a character witness.

He refused and instead turned witness for the prosecution, helping to secure the conviction of John Porteous, who was jailed for eight years, later reduced to five on appeal, for sexually abusing Mr Whelan, now 50, and others.

Mr Shaw, from the outset of his report, had warned of the dangers of applying 21st century morals to historic abuse. Mr Whelan, however, has little time for such niceties. The abuse that took place, after all, would have been illegal at the time. "We should not make excuses for the past," he said.

Helen Holland agrees. Now 49, she was sent to Nazareth House in Kilmarnock, a children's home run by nuns, when she was five. "My grandmother had died and my father was told, by our parish priest, that it was not decent for me and my sisters to live in a house with three men.
"The three men were my dad, my uncle and my grandfather. Ironic, really, at Nazareth House I was raped by a priest."

Two days after Ms Holland was brought to the home she was beaten to a pulp by a nun after being found, lonely and frightened, snuggling up to her big sister in a single bed. "She called me a brazen hussie," Ms Holland said.

Later, when Ms Holland was eight, a nun pulled a hood over her head to help a priest rape her. The sexual abuse went on for three years until, aged 11, she fell pregnant. The same nun kicked her in the stomach until she miscarried.

Scotland, Mr Shaw announced, should have a national task force, answerable to parliament and not the executive, whose sole job should be to listen to children, young and old, in whoever's care they are in, church or state.

"I am deeply concerned about the possibility of people who were not listened to as children not being listened to as adults," Mr Shaw said yesterday, calling for a centre for historic abuse, a one-stop shop where stories - and records - could be collected, lest anyone forget.

Why? Because, Mr Shaw said, there are still children who are "out of sight and out of mind".


"De leiders van het land"

Denk ik aan de dode dagen
Van 't laatste cricketspel
Aan de stemmen, nu verslagen
Van de mensen rond 't veld
.....

Laat mij dan ook, Heer hierboven
Denken aan de overkant
Waar die lieve doden wonen
O, de leiders van 't land
Waar die lieve doden wonen
O, de leiders van het land

Dromend zien wij Cambridge liggen
En de kerk van Engeland
Boerderijen met veel biggen
Oude dames met hun krant
En dan smeek ik: Landgenoten
Breek uzelf niet langer af
Maar prijs God omdat ge blank zijt
En nog wel in Engeland
O, blijf daarom immer bidden
Voor de leiders van 't land
O, blijf daarom immer bidden
Voor de leiders van ons land

Liesbeth List zingt Theodorakis
1967

Hollands water: mirakels goed.












Zwarte Piet wiedewiedewiet
'hoor je wel maar 'k zie je niet
wil je Sint de groeten doen


Call for care home abuse centre BBC news 22 November 2007,
A centre should be established to help former victims of abuse in children's homes, a report has suggested.
It also recommended a "national task group" to oversee services for children in care and residential homes.
The recommendations came in an report commissioned by the previous Scottish Executive, into abuse in Scottish children's homes between 1950 and 1995.
Children's Minister Adam Ingram said he would consider how lessons could be learned from the past.
The report by Tom Shaw, former chief inspector of education in Northern Ireland, focused on child welfare regulations over a 45-year period, and how these were enforced.
It said that despite extensive and complex regulation, they were not "wholly effective in ensuring children's safety and welfare".
Mr Shaw warned that problems still existed, 12 years on from 1995.
'Same problems'
"In some respects you could say that everything that was identified as needing to be done in 1995, is now in place," he said.
"And yet, the same problems are occurring, the same needs exist, and the same concerns that motivated government to legislate in 1995 still exist."
The Children (Scotland) Act was passed in 1995, which set out the rights of children in care.
The proposed centre would help former victims find counselling and other services, would carry out research into children's residential homes and maintain a database of past and present children's residential establishments in Scotland.
The task group recommended in the report should have "oversight" of services provided for children in care and in accommodation, study ways of improving their welfare and report to Holyrood's education committee.
Mr Shaw's review also highlighted an "urgent" need for action to preserve old records and ensure former residents can obtain access to them.
The report was commissioned after a Holyrood debate in 2004 in which the then First Minister, Jack McConnell, publicly apologised to children who were abused while in care.
The Scottish Executive had already ruled out an inquiry into allegations of abuse in Scotland's residential homes dating back to the 1940s.
Mr Shaw's report warned against imposing 21st Century views on what happened in the past and noted that attitudes to children had changed, with legal acknowledgement of children's rights only taking full effect within the last ten years.
Public awareness
It said that although abuse was known about during the study period, public awareness did not develop until the 1980s.
"Throughout the period there was a lack of qualified care staff, perhaps a symptom of the low status given to residential child care," he said.
The law responded only slowly to growing awareness of the abuse of children, and corporal punishment was allowed in some residential establishments until the 1980s.
Mr Ingram said: "We are in full agreement with the principles of the findings and recommendations but we must consider with partners and survivors how we can most effectively take forward the lessons to be learned."
He said there would be specific proposals for those formerly in residential care as part of a wider strategy for people who have suffered childhood sexual abuse.