Sexual abuse report: Schools were routinely places of brutal, simmering violence

For years afterwards, I thought perhaps I had dreamed it up: the narrow plank of wood, about the length of a metre stick, hacked off at an angle on one end and speared through the middle with a rusty nail. It must have been a leftover from a domestic DIY project that she came across and thought, yes, that will do nicely. And it did: one smart whack on the palm if we were merely bold, two strikes if we were really bad. When her colour was up or she had one of her headaches, you knew it was not going to be a good day.
I have other vivid memories of my early years in school: girls being slammed into the blackboard; girls having their chairs pulled out from underneath them; an entire class made to stand out in front of their desks with both palms upturned, braced for the punishment; the shameful pool of urine under my chair.
This is nothing at all in the context of the graphic, appalling accounts published this week in the scoping report into the sexual abuse of children in schools run by religious orders. It is only worth repeating because it was so unremarkable. The report is a reminder, if any were needed, that up to the 1980s and sometimes beyond, schools were routinely places of simmering violence. Children were not regarded as sentient beings with rights, but as receptacles for whatever adults wished to inflict on them.
Truly terrible things were happening to small boys in the two schools down the road from mine, to boys and girls in schools across the city, and around the country. The individual stories in the report are unbearable to read but the scale is dizzying: 2,395 individual allegations of sexual abuse, 308 schools, 884 alleged abusers. There is no hierarchy of horror, but the most appalling figure may be the 590 allegations involving alleged abusers in 17 special schools. The scoping inquiry report runs to more than 700 pages. Listing all the locations in which children were abused would require more words than are available in this column.
Sickeningly, considering the role the Catholic Church still plays in Irish education, the report describes how some felt religious teaching and sacraments were deployed as instruments of grooming. “Feelings of shame were encouraged in children, with Confession being used as one tool to promote these ideas,” it says.
These numbers, as the report itself makes clear, are only a foreshadowing of what is to come. They don’t include State-run, non-religious schools. They don’t include the thousands of people who have yet to speak, or who may never speak. The CSO estimates that among those aged over 35, some 15,300 men and 26,000 women will have experienced sexual violence as a child in a school. They do not include mere physical violence, which was explicitly sanctioned by the State until 1982 and was, the report says, “pervasive, unpredictable, painful and normalised” in some schools.
It is understandable, and entirely right, that the physical abuse of children has been eclipsed by the serious sexual crimes carried out against children. But violent and emotional abuse are also part of the dark tapestry of wrongs done to children by the State and its agents. Brothers, priests and nuns, aided by the worst of their lay lieutenants, may have done the gruntwork, but the State allowed it to happen.
When Mark and David Ryan bravely told their stories of abuse at Blackrock, it unleashed a tsunami of other stories. We asked readers to share their experiences of corporal punishment in The Irish Times. First, women came forward to describe being beaten in school with rounders bats and leather straps, having their skirts yanked up, being slapped on the head, taunted and told, over and over, that they were worthless, and in the days after those stories were published, more women and men followed, with more horror stories. One man described a Brother as “a violent, screaming, fuming terrorist who beat children mercilessly and for interminable periods”. Sixty years on, thinking of this man “and those in charge who sat on their hands and did nothing to rescue us makes me breathless with rage”.
These stories may never be heard in their own right in a formal State inquiry setting. The report of the scoping inquiry notes that “others gave accounts of very serious physical abuse in schools, including those run by religious orders… far exceeding what might have been considered at the time to be acceptable corporal punishment, including the use of implements such as modified leather straps, wooden sticks and knuckle-dusters”. One survivor described witnessing “violence that he believes to have led to the death of another child” which was subsequently investigated by gardaí. But these accounts could only be included in volume 4 section C, entitled “other contributions”, because they were outside the inquiry’s remit.
The report suggests that the future commission of inquiry will need to either use sampling or sit-in divisions, or possibly both, in order to get to grips with the scale of sexual abuse. The Government is already warning that it will have to put a time limit on the investigation. The routine nature of physical violence meted out to children means the issue may simply be too vast to ever be subject to a formal inquiry like this. But a mechanism to, at a minimum, gather written testimonies of the reality of that “reasonable chastisement” should be given urgent consideration.
At some point, we will have to reckon with the full spectrum of harm done to children in Irish schools under the cold gaze of the omnipresent statue of the Virgin Mary, and the unseeing eyes of official Ireland. We cannot move on as a society until we do.