Child abuse inquiry told children raped by other children in Darwin home
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Version 0 of 1. Children as young as seven were raped by other children at the Retta Dixon home for Indigenous wards of the state, the child sexual abuse royal commission has heard. Veronica Johns, 56, had two supporters sit with her in the witness box as she gave evidence of the abuse she suffered at the Northern Territory home, where she lived from the age of three to 15. She was seven when she was twice raped by an older boy at the home, which was operated in Darwin by the Aborigines Inland Mission from 1946 until 1980 for mixed race Aboriginal children who had been taken from their families. She recounted numerous incidents of boys molesting girls at the home and said the superintendent, Mervyn Pattemore, never took any action. Her younger brother, Kevin Stagg, 54, told the commission he was about four when he was taken to the home. The environment was highly sexualised among the children, he said, and games and conversations had sexual connotations. He told the commission under privilege that a house parent, Donald Henderson, was a large, intimidating man who raped him when he was seven while collecting eggs from the chook shed. At the same time, three older boys were grooming him for sex and he then became the “property” of an older boy, who raped him three times. He was sexually molested twice a week until he was about 10, and hassled and set up for punishments if he refused, he said. “If you let them abuse you, life was a lot easier,” Stagg told the commission. Once he was taken to hospital after a rape by Henderson, who wouldn’t let him speak to hospital staff and told them other children had done it, Stagg told the commission. “Sometimes we had to wear diapers ... to school so the blood didn’t come out on the school uniform,” he said. He tried to tell Pattemore about Henderson, but says the superintendent accused him of lying and caned him until he said it was the other boys who had done it. Stagg never reported the incidents to police: “They are the authorities and the authorities are the people who abuse you.” After leaving the home he was imprisoned several times for various crimes and developed heroin and alcohol addictions. Stagg said he hadn’t really been a father to his 15 children. “I’m not proud of that, I’m disgusted by it,” he wept. “I have to live with the fact that I was brought into this world to be somebody’s sexual plaything, and as a result I have gone out into the world and been involved in sex, drugs and violence.” The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse hearing in Darwin continues. |