Beatings and abuse: woman recalls her life as a 15-year-old at girls' home

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/beatings-abuse-woman-recalls-girls-home

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When Janet Mulquiney was beaten and sexually abused by her guardians at a Parramatta girls’ home, she kept quiet.

There were worse places she dreaded being sent.

In 1969, aged 15, Mulquiney was sent to the Parramatta Girls’ Training School for 18 months after being charged for running away from her northern beaches home.

She gave evidence on Thursday morning at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in Sydney.

The latest public hearing is focusing on abuse that took place at two government-run girls’ homes, the Parramatta Girls’ Training School in Sydney’s west and the Institute for Girls in Hay.

When Mulquiney was at the Parramatta home more than four decades ago, she was punched in the eye by its head, Superintendent Percival Mayhew, after being taken to his office for insubordination.

She had asked to go to the toilet outside the permitted time.

“I got a black eye,” she told the commission.

“He was very imposing and scary and you just absolutely knew that if you had to go and see him you were in the biggest trouble under the sun.”

She was so afraid of reprisal she did not say anything to her mother and her parents were told she had lost visiting privileges for behaving poorly.

“It wasn’t until my eye healed that my mum could come back again,” she said.

Things quickly worsened.

While bending over to scrub shoes, an officer tried to lift Mulquiney’s skirt.

“I jumped, I swirled around and I threw the brush at the officer. I can remember saying ‘get away’,” she said.

Mulquiney was thrown in “the dungeon” for insubordination and attacking an officer.

While there, she was given steel wool and told to scrub clean metal garbage bins “caked thick with food”.

“They were disgusting, smelly and hard.”

A few hours later, the dim light in the room was switched off.

She was then told in a gravelly male whisper: “Keep quiet. Everything will be all right if you keep quiet”.

There was “some fumbling” in the dark and Mulquiney’s underwear was removed.

“I didn’t know what was happening to me. I can remember saying `stop you’re hurting me’,” she said.

“I was shoved pretty roughly up against the wall and told ‘sshhhh’.” Her unknown assailant then “put his fingers inside”.

Mulquiney was told if she spoke up, she would be sent to the Hay home, where no eye contact or conversation was allowed.

“All you got to do all day was scrub the asphalt quadrangle with bricks until there was nothing left of the brick. Then you got another brick,” she said.

“Girls came back from there very bruised and beaten and swollen.”

While concluding her statement, Mulquiney said: “What happened in there has never left.”

The inquiry continues.