Jersey home victims tell of abuse

Simon de Bruxelles and Elizabeth Gosch

The Australian

RESIDENTS of a former children's home in Jersey where parts of a child's skeleton were uncovered have given the first harrowing accounts of institutionalised brutality and sexual abuse.

The stories emerged as it was revealed Australian police were working with two officers from the British Channel Islands sent to investigate local links to more than 40 years of systemic child abuse at the home.

The detectives have been interviewing former residents of Haut de la Garenne after a child's remains, including a skull, were found under a thick concrete floor inside the Victorian mansion last weekend.

It is understood the detectives arrived in Australia earlier this month to follow up leads in at least two states as details emerged of alleged systemic physical and sexual abuse at the home, including claims of rape, floggings and solitary confinement.

An Australian Federal Police spokeswoman said the AFP had helped British authorities to liaise with state and territory police to collect witness statements regarding historical child abuse in Jersey.

In an investigation that began in 2006, Jersey police have been examining missing persons records and following up claims of child abuse by more than 150 former residents of the home.

Haut de la Garenne opened in 1867 as an industrial school for young people of the lower classes of society and neglected children and operated as a children's home until the 1980s.

The discovery of the child's remains together with a girl's hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric on the weekend prompted excavation of a bricked-up cellar at the home.

Specialist sniffer dogs trained to detect human remains have identified at least six other "hot spots" at the home where bodies could be buried.

In Britain overnight a mother of two described how she was drugged so that she would remain docile while being raped and sexually assaulted by members of staff.

Another former resident, Peter Hannaford, now a trade union official on the island, said his earliest memories were of sexual abuse by home staff .

Pamela (not her real name) spent four years at the home in the mid-1970s. She claims that her complaints of abuse were ignored until the current police investigation began last year. She has told police that staff would get drunk before selecting a child to abuse.

Those who refused to co-operate were drugged with Valium or bribed with cigarettes and alcohol.

She said: "The things that happened are indescribable - the most cruel, sadistic and evil acts you could think of. What makes it worse is that these acts were practised on very vulnerable children who had nowhere to go and nobody to turn to for help.

Children came and went with little or no explanation because they were sent to foster parents or because they ran away to escape the abuse, making it difficult for police to keep track of who was at the home.

Mr Hannaford, now 59, was sent to Haut de la Garenne as an infant after the death of his parents and spent 12 years at the home. He said: "Boys and girls were abused while I was there. The abuse was anything from rape to torture. It was men and women who abused us.

"It happened every night and it happened to everyone. I was scared to go to bed. You were threatened with punishment if you said anything, which could have been a whip or anything."

Cyril Turner, 48, who was sent to Haut de la Garenne for truancy, said that violence was an everyday occurrence.

"We were quite often given dead arms and dead legs by the staff. I remember being frog-marched around the place. If you were bad, you would get locked in a dark room with just bread and water," he said.

"That's the way it was back then; people said things about what was happening but nothing was done. A lot of the staff would be very physical. Kids were thrown around a lot."