Forest Heights
So, another industrial school. How sweet.
Haut de la Garenne has a darker past. It opened in 1867 as an industrial school for young people of the lower classes and neglected children…The gruesome secrets escaping its imposing stone walls today are ugly and deeply disturbing: stories of beatings, rape, torture, imprisonment of children…The prison-style solitary confinement cells contained just a bed and a potty. Le Monnier, 43, says: “It made you feel depressed, lonely and degraded.”…Turner recalls being hit over the head with pillows filled with boots and shoes. “You’d go to bed and pow, they’d get you,” Turner says. “Times change. It was acceptable back then. It wasn’t just me, it was a lot of the children, most of the children.”
That’s just the impression you get from Goldenbridge, from the testimony of the nuns as well as that of the children – it was acceptable back then. It’s scary to contemplate the kinds of things that have been acceptable in the past.
Former victims say they were chained and physically abused in underground cellars. Based on this information police began searching Haut de la Garenne. Human bloodstains, a pair of shackles and a large concrete bath were discovered in a bricked-up cellar last month. Officers reportedly found a message scrawled on a wall saying: “I’ve been bad for years and years.” Police also discovered part of a child’s skull together with a girl’s hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric buried in a stairwell. Jersey’s deputy police chief Lenny Harper, the officer in charge of the inquiry, says the discovery of a trapdoor into the cellar corroborates what victims told police. It leads down into a complex of at least four cellars.
Oh, Christ. And the former victims are being threatened, and corrupt cops and pols are trying to discredit the inquiry.
“There is no doubt allegations were made by children in the past and they were simply not dealt with the way they should have been; that includes the police, the social services and everyone else.”
That’s Haut de la Garenne.
My grandfather came from Jersey, many years ago. It’s a sobering thought that, so recently, children were being tortured and abused in such a place. Plato said (something like) ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ The more I hear, the more I experience, only the dead have seen the end of misery. (And then, of course, so many religious claim, that death will bring, to all unbelievers, miseries even greater. It’s a comfort, though, religion, isn’t it?)
Eric: I suppose it is if you believe that in the afterlife all misery will be justly inflicted. That is, if you believe that people like these child abusers in Jersey, who have gotten away with it for so long, would finally get their just desserts in the afterlife.
I suspect that’s a huge part of the appeal of religion to the disenfranchised: the belief that the wicked will finally be punished at some point, even if they get away with everything in this life.
(Of course, if you just believe that everything who believes something different from you will suffer in hell, then that moves away from “justice” and into the territory of “sadism.”)
I dont think outright child abuse was ever aceptable O.B beating children was common when I grew up my teachers would all cane me on a regular basis but none of them would have condoned this stuff at Jersey or Goldenridge.
The appeal of the after-life is to get away with wordly mischief & still keep all heavenly options open.
It’s all a sad reminder of how small is the space within the human condition for a genuinely materialist humanitarianism. If even the fires of Hell can’t stop bastards like these, in a rich, comfortable corner of a rich, comfortable country, what can?
Richard, of course it was acceptable, otherwise the people who did it wouldn’t have done it. The nuns at Goldenbridge thought what they were doing was entirely acceptable. This was routine, traditional, institutional stuff – that’s why it happened in institutions.
Power changes things. If you put people in charge, then they’re likely to take charge in any way that they please, if they can get away with it. And if they do — and they did — then it was accepted.
A test case was the witchcraze in Europe. This was one of the first times that women were subject in large numbers to the immediate control of strange men, and the things that men did to women, in the name of identifying and punishing witchcraft, is a barely readable part of the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The same goes for orphans, truants, native kids (in, say, the US or Canada or Australia). Give adults isolated and fairly complete control, and horrible things happen. That’s why the family, as model of human society, has failed so badly and so often. Women and children have been widely and sometimes openly abused, and they still are abused where men still have the upper hand. Why should it surprise us that it took place at Haut de la Garenne?
The thing is to learn from these mistakes. “Normal” folk very often have dark centres. This is precisely why it is wrong to shroud women or to hide them from public view. When you see a woman in a burqua, it’s more than just a body we aren’t supposed to see. That also is why children should be heard as well as seen.
“The Beast of Jersey, whose real name was Edward Paisnel, was a notorious paedophile who terrorised the Channel Island of Jersey for a period of eleven years from 1960. He infamously dressed in a rubber mask and nail-studded wristlets, attacking women and children, and would visit Haut de la Garenne care home dressed as Santa Claus.”
He must have had lots and lots of sweets and other goodies for them!
I remember once – a man who broke into a newly built (annexed) dormitory in Goldenbridge. Children (who were in various states of undress under/in their nighties)literally screamed their heads off. He was known to have approached a specific child. Thankfully, he was caught in time. It is alleged that he escaped from Dublin’s (Grange Gorman) mental hospital.
I have got the shivers.
Speaking of rosary beads. Today I passed by the Church of the Holy Rosary, Dublin. On a holy placard on the grass verge I saw the words. “Spread the Rosary and you will be Saved.” Did you know, OB, that by your actions in this very N&C you are forevermore redeemed? A lot of my rosaries – a very long time ago went to a lot of Irish graves. So I am real chuffed to know that I have done my fair share of rescuing sinners. I AM SAVED! Alleluia! Alleluia! Oh, wait a second, it is a wee bit too early for all this joyous chanting.
“Oh, Christ.”
Why are you appealing to him? Bit irrational, isn’t it?