haut de la garenne Sexual Abuser

April 2012 Jersey Haut de la Garenne abuse ‘survivor’ speaks out Sarah was sent to Haut de la Garenne in Jersey in the 1970s, at the age of 10, after her parents split up.

She said it was a real shock and the atmosphere at the home was like the novel Lord of the Flies.

She said that “you had to learn to be tough to survive”.

Sarah, not her real name, remembered seeing children dragged off to the “detention room” – a bare cell without furniture – where they would be imprisoned for up to a week.

Punishment was sudden and sometimes for minor infractions.

Sarah said: “If they didn’t like the way you said something that could be enough”.

She said children were often hit As a young teenager she was sexually abused by a member of staff for several years.

She did not tell anyone.

It was only later, as an adult, that she realised how wrong this had been.

When the historic child abuse investigation came to national attention in 2008, Sarah contacted the police and later joined the civil action brought by several lawyers against the States of Jersey.

It was those lawsuits, representing more than 100 abuse victims, which finally prompted the States to offer financial compensation.

Sarah said for her, the settlement was an acknowledgement of what happened.

She said: “We were children in care but we weren’t cared for.” She said she could now close that chapter of her life but doubted all the other victims would be able to do that.

Many in Jersey want a full public inquiry into the decades of abuse.

While that inquiry has been promised, no date has yet been set, nor terms of reference.

Sarah believes it has to be chaired by a British judge rather than someone from the island to have the confidence of the victims.

Although she sees herself as a survivor determined to overcome what happened, Sarah admitted it was tough.

“I just can’t trust people, even now.

When your childhood has been taken away you can never get it back,” she said.

March 2012 Jersey child abuse victims to receive compensation Around 90 people who were sexually and physically abused by their carers in Jersey children‘s homes will receive compensation of up to £60,000 after the government in St Helier offered an “unreserved apology” to the victims.

Announcing the launch of a “historic abuse redress scheme” on Thursday, Jersey’s chief minister, Ian Gorst, acknowledged “that the care system that operated historically in the island of Jersey failed some children in the states’ residential care in a serious way”.

At least 43 of the victims set to receive compensation were mistreated at the Haut de la Garenne care home, which in 2008 became the centre of a criminal investigation into historic child abuse allegations.

Police excavated the grounds of the home after receiving tip-offs that children could have been murdered and buried under the building.

No human remains were ever found and Jersey police subsequentlyadmitted that their initial inquiry was flawed.

But behind the scenes and away from the headlines, police were still investigating more than 100 allegations of serious child abuse at the home.

By the time the historic inquiry was closed in December 2010, eight people had been prosecuted.

These included Michael Aubin, who admitted abusing young boys in the 1970s while he was a resident at Haut de le Garenne.

Gordon Claude Wateridge was sentenced to two years in jail in 2009, aged 78, after being found guilty of eight indecent assaults and one common assault.

One woman who was sexually abused by a carer at the home for at least three years in the 1970s said on Thursday that it was “about time” the states of Jersey accepted responsibility for the abuse meted out by its employees at Haut de la Garenne over such a long period.

The woman, who did not want to be named, said in a phone interview: “Compensation is probably the wrong word because you can’t give people their lives back, but the only way we can be compensated for what happened is with money.” She said the Jersey authorities were slow to react to allegations of abuse and had until now not apologised for the agonies inflicted on so many children in their care.

But the money went a little way towards showing regret.

“Money is all they understand in Jersey,” said the woman, who is now in her 50s.

Last year, along with 42 other victims, she launched a case for compensation at the high court in London after their complaints were ignored in Jersey.

This action will now be discontinued in the light of the compensation.

The woman was sexually abused by a male carer from the age of 13 until after her 16th birthday.

It later emerged that he had been convicted of having unlawful sex with a minor before getting his job at the Jersey home, and after leaving the island he was convicted of child sex charges at a school.

The woman said it took her until the mid-1990s to pluck up the courage to report the abuse to Jersey’s children’s services department – and that her allegations were not taken seriously enough.

“They never gave me any indications that I wasn’t the only one,” she said.

The woman questioned the motives of the Jersey administration in announcing the compensation scheme.

“I think they realise they were morally culpable, but the main thing is that they don’t want any more embarrassment,” she said.

“They don’t want to have it all dragged out and have reporters digging around again – it’s not good for the island.” There was outrage in 2008 when the former chief minister Frank Walker was caught on microphone saying that one of the island’s politicians, Stuart Syvret, was “trying to shaft Jersey internationally” by acting as a whistleblower in the abuse inquiry.

Alan Collins, a lawyer who represents 43 victims, said: “No amount of compensation can ever put right what the these children endured, but no matter how imperfect the means to achieve justice, what matters is the fact that the states of Jersey has recognised the need to do the right thing”.

To claim compensation from the Historic Abuse Redress Scheme, victims have to prove that they were abused while in the island’s full-time residential care at any time between 9 May 1945, the day Jersey was liberated from its Nazi occupation, and 31 December 1994.