Abuse most foul

Ted Mullighan has lifted the lid on decades of institutionalised pedophilia in South Australia

YOU might think that after 46 years as a barrister and judge, there wasn't too much that would shock Ted Mullighan.

Think again. Mullighan's landmark inquiry into the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable young people while in state care in South Australia peeled back layer upon layer of institutionalised depravity, cruelty and wanton injustice such as to defy belief.

"Nothing prepared me for the foul undercurrent of society revealed in the evidence to the inquiry," the commissioner wrote, prefacing his 564-page report released yesterday. "I had no understanding of the widespread prevalence of the sexual abuse of children in South Australia and its frequent devastating and often lifelong consequences for many of them."

Small wonder that Premier Mike Rann felt physically sick as he read the harrowing cases of abuse Mullighan documents, some dating back half a century, others searingly recent, but all anchored in the here-and-now because of the victims' continuing struggle to come to terms with what happened to them.

 LIVING THROUGH THE HORROR "You got to the stage where you thought (sexual abuse) was just part of the norm: keep your mouth shut, otherwise you were worse off than everybody else." "The social group absorbed people like myself, and you would be passed around between them and paid ... they were wanting sex, I was paid for it, and everyone went their own ways." "I'm 5 1/2 years old. I'm terrified, you know, scared shitless, and there's this bloke threatening to bloody kill me." "They had this thing in there if you were a telltale, you suffered for it. You'd really get bashed up and everything else to go with it." "I was always angry (about) what happened to me ... it ruined my life, as far as I'm concerned. But it was still in my head and so I still had the nightmares, I still had the horror." "I've been hurt, and that apology, a genuine apology, is extremely important to me because it would help relieve some of the grief that sits there to this day." "I remember getting raped by the male staff and there was blood everywhere, on my sheets and all that and it hurt, and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone because they'd just flush your head in the toilet and you'd keep getting punished." "I was approached by the same person and forced to have anal sex again. I really wanted to commit suicide. I just decided that I was going to toughen up and just allow it not to happen again, but it continued to happen." "Whenever he felt like oral sex he would take me off to a dormitory or to the ablutions block on the western side of the central dormitory. When he wanted to have oral sex he was aggressive and intimidating to frighten me." "To put it bluntly, (the abuse) buggered my life to a certain degree. Having said that, for 50-odd years I've just put it to the back of my mind and that's where it has stayed." "So lost, so lonely, so sad, so worthless ... Oh, I cried every day. I cried myself to sleep every night. I used to go off into the toilet any time and I would just sob."

Tracey Phillips, 40, who was sexually abused from the age of 14 while in foster care, says she has never fully recovered from the trauma. "I have had trouble forming long-term relationships ... I don't know where the boundaries are," she tells The Australian as she stands on the steps of the state parliament in Adelaide with other victims, waiting for the report to be handed down.

Priscilla Taylor, 55, who was sexually abused as a seven-year-old in Adelaide's state-run Seaforth children's home, added: "We were nobody."

From the outset of his inquiry in 2004, Mullighan was determined to let victims know he was not just another authority figure like the ones they had learned to fear, but was there to listen personally to their stories and believe them. "I'm not going to conduct an inquiry on the basis of reading somebody's statement, I'm going to listen to their stories myself," he said at the time.

The ground he traversed is well-travelled in Australia by such commissions. That it has happened before, elsewhere, only goes to make Mullighan's report more shocking. It covers cases dating back to the 1940s in which already traumatised children and adolescents, removed from their homes as protection or as punishment, were abused by their carers, government and church staff and even each other. In some cases, they were farmed out to pedophiles while social workers turned a blind eye; at other times, what was left of their innocence was traded away for a handful of cigarettes. "I don't think there was any doubt that there were a number of groups of people who were preying on children and abusing them," Mullighan says.

Imagine the plight of this little boy, just one among the dozens of unspeakably sad case studies contained in the report. He was 10 when placed by a court in state care and sent to the state-run Glandore Boys Home, in Adelaide's southwest, during the mid-'50s (that institution, like many of those referred to by Mullighan, is long gone.)

One night, not long after his arrival at Glandore, the boy woke in his dormitory bed, vomiting. A male staff member led him to the shower block. The child, desperate for affection, was grateful when the man offered to dry him with a towel. "I thought he was helping me because no one had dried me before except my mother and father," he told Mullighan. Then the man told him to bend over and hold on to a bench. After anally raping the boy, the man told him: "Only sooks cry; stop crying you bloody sook."

At Seaforth Home, originally a beachside convalescent centre for children, a 13-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a maintenance man within weeks of her arrival there. A female worker also accosted her, and the girl thought "she was giving me love, and I accepted again". Later, she had sex with a man who approached her on the way to school in return for an ice cream. She told Mullighan, whose investigators confirmed how she later ran away from the home, that for years she felt the sexual abuse had been her fault.

Another man gave evidence of how, as a six-year-old in the '50s, he had been placed in Glandore's "little boys' ward". There, he was immediately raped by older boys at the home. Soon after, he woke in the night to find a man on top of him. He said he was later told by a member of the staff: "The bloke that did it ... was a policeman, and the police have the right to come on to Glandore and have a boy any ... time they want one. So you all better keep your bums clean in case."

Like the other terrified boys in the ward, the witness said he subsequently stopped washing and wiping himself after using the toilet.

A former person in care at Kennion House, an Anglican church home that closed in 1984, recalled how as an 11-year-old in the late '70s he had been taken out at the weekend by a staff member. Not for a day at the beach, but for sex parties with male acquaintances of the worker: "I was taken for them," he told Mullighan. Another boy was also brought in to have sex with the men. The witness said he was given gifts to keep quiet about the abuse.

One man who stayed at the Lochiel Park home in northeast Adelaide, described the abuse he suffered at the hands of staff when he was about 13, in the early '70s. He said a staff member would take him and other boys to a place where men would photograph them.

"They'd get us to lie next to other kids and they'd take photos of us naked," he said. "I told a counsellor about it at Lochiel Park and she said she was going to talk to somebody about it, but I never heard anything about it."

He said a staff member had also tried to rape him, ripping his anus so badly medical treatment was required. At age 14 he ran away from Lochiel Park, seeking refuge at his mother's home. He alleges that while he was there, however, he was raped by her husband.

Another woman who lived at Seaforth Home in the early '60s, when she was 13 years old, told the inquiry that while there, groups of girls were taken to have dinner at a hotel.

"Matron lined us up before we went and said we were all to behave and do as we were told ... we would get lollies if we were good."

At the hotel, they joined a table full of men in suits, with each girl sitting next to a man. After dinner, the man next to her took her upstairs and had sex with her. "He just said, 'We're going to get undressed and go to bed for a while,' and it was sort of made clear that you didn't repeat to anyone what had happened." She said other girls went upstairs with a different man, one at a time. "When I came back down, we had ice cream."

Though most reported episodes of abuse occurred in the '60s and '70s, others are shockingly recent, running right up until the time Mullighan opened his inquiry in 2004.

Take the state facility at Lochiel Park, which continues to operate as a juvenile mental health unit. By the mid-'90s, staff and police had realised there was something sinister in how some children would go missing for days at a time, then return with new clothes.

"They were basically prostituting for cigarettes, drugs, maybe some alcohol and a good time," one staff member from those days told the inquiry.

By then, the pedophiles had become so bold they would contact the home, demanding that certain boys be allowed out. Yet, according to the staff member, the ultimate tragedy was that at least one of the pedophiles, who were "well known", looked after the children better than staff at the home did. "I couldn't believe it ... (the boy) walked into the unit and he was a young man," the staff member told the inquiry. "You had a known sexual offender actually do more with this kid than the department could. It was just all bizarre."

Mullighan commented in his report: "This was not an isolated case."

In fact there were 809 hearings over the inquiry's three years, and their evidence has led to the police investigation of 434 alleged abusers, 14 of which are now before the Director of Public Prosecutions.

State Families and Communities Minister Jay Weatherill said when the hearings opened that he expected "an uncomfortable outcome, both for this and previous governments".

That "uncomfortable outcome" was only one of the factors that delayed the SA Government from setting up an inquiry, years after other states had already looked at abuse of children in state care, despite considerable political pressure.

The Forgotten Australians Senate inquiry, conducted over 2003 and 2004, estimated that of the 500,000 Australian children in institutional care between 1900 and the '80s, 150,000 were in SA, also singling the state out for criticism for destroying the records of wards of the state.

The Rann Government announced the inquiry in 2004 under the widely respected Mullighan, a former barrister and Supreme Court judge.

Admitted to the Roll of Practitioners of the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1962, Mullighan has distinguished himself in the state's legal circles over the years.

He also was attuned to the political sensitivies that go hand in hand with commissions of inquiry: earlier in his legal career, Mullighan acted as counsel assisting at the royal commission into the sacking of then police commissioner Harold Salisbury in the '70s, an episode that contributed to the fall of Labor premier Don Dunstan and created tensions that still play out in Adelaide.

The end is in sight for Mullighan's biggest task to date, but he has more work to do.

He has until the end of the month to complete an addendum to his report, with the results of investigations into child sex abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, in the north of the state.

With those victims adding their voices to those in yesterday's report, the chorus determined to ensure such abuse is never concealed again will hopefully provide a formidable force protecting society's most vulnerable.