Canada and its
dark practices can be compared to: Nazi infamy in concentration camps, the
vision of terror against children in the Middle East, the hell of fear of the
survival of Guantanamo children, violence and torture of the children of Abu
Ghraib. These are the severe pain and suffering, traumas inflicted on
defenseless children in Canada.
Province ignored whistleblowers who warned about child
abuse at its training schools
An ongoing Star investigation of
alleged physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the schools for troubled youth
between the 1960s and the 1980s found that the province was warned as early as
1972.
By Kenyon WallaceNews
reporter
CANADA CHILD
PROTECTIVE SOCIETIES CRIMINALS
Shocked by what he was hearing about what allegedly went on inside these “training schools” — residential institutions for troubled children operated by the province — Brewer wrote to his superiors at the Ministry of Correctional Services.
Nothing happened.
The following year, Brewer told several family court judges about the allegations of brutality, which by then had increased and had also begun to come from fellow probation workers. He told the judges he believed training schools were “not fit places to send our children.”
Ashley Smith being tied to special Prostraint chair
By 1974, Brewer’s continued insistence on raising his concerns in court was becoming too uncomfortable for the provincial government, so it ordered him to stop talking, suspended him and held a secret discipline hearing.
An ongoing Star investigation of alleged physical, sexual and emotional abuse at training schools between the 1960s and the 1980s found that Brewer, 38, was one of two officials to warn the province of brutal and sadistic treatment at the hands of staff — warnings the province appears to have ignored.
The Star’s investigation also found that the province has paid out 220 settlements to victims of historical abuse at training schools. The payouts ranged from several thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and victims were made to sign confidentiality agreements — “gag orders” as some survivors call them — preventing them from discussing their settlements.
READ MORE:
Systematic torture of Canadian
aboriginal children in the name of the REGIMES AND Lord!
Several former training school
residents who settled with the province chose to break their silence to tell
the Star their stories and demand a public acknowledgment of the abuse. In
interviews and statements of claim filed with court they have recounted being
subjected to a range of shocking abuse at the hands of teachers and staff,
including sodomy, forced oral sex, fondling and beatings.
Children sent to these schools —
some as young as 8 — need not have committed any crimes. Parents or guardians
could apply to family court to have children they were “unable to control” sent
to training school. These children were commonly deemed “unmanageable” or
“incorrigible.” From the 1960s to the 1980s, the province operated about a
dozen such schools in places such as Simcoe, Bowmanville and Cobourg.
It was at one school in Hagersville
that probation officer Brewer heard about a staff member boasting about a broom
closet at the school being the place used to brutalize misbehaving children.
Information about Brewer’s decision
to go public with his concerns comes from documents related to his hearing at
the Public Service Grievance Board, an independent tribunal for employment
disputes in the Ontario public service, and media reports at the time.
Fearing that his concerns were
repeatedly being ignored, Brewer went to the media, appearing on a City TV talk
show in September 1974 to discuss publicly what he had heard. It was career
suicide.
The ministry convened a closed
discipline hearing for Brewer over several months and fired him. Speaking to
the media without permission was one of the reasons the Ministry of
Correctional Services cited in its dismissal of Brewer in April 1975.
'A lot of questions I raised about
training schools have gone unanswered'
William Brewer
Former Ontario probation officer
His dismissal letter, written by then deputy minister of correctional
services Glenn R. Thompson, cited Brewer’s “generalized negative statements in
court regarding training school programs,” “total disregard of the ministry’s
written policy regarding interviews with the news media” and his “violation of
the oath of office and secrecy in this respect.”Thompson also cited Brewer’s “refusal to return probation files pertaining to various individual clients” and noted that Brewer’s maintenance of administrative records was “unsatisfactory,” and that Brewer was previously reprimanded for “failing to follow instructions.”
“I am particularly disturbed by the position you have taken never to recommend a probationer for admission to the training schools system, without consideration of the appropriateness of this resource for specific individuals,” Thompson wrote in documents obtained by the Star.
When reached by the Star recently, Thompson said he had “no recollection” of the Brewer case.
Brewer appealed his dismissal to the Public Service Grievance Board, and it, too, held a private hearing. The board then denied Brewer’s appeal.
“I still think it is unfair, and a lot of questions I raised about training schools have gone unanswered,” Brewer told the Star on July 31, 1975, the day he lost his appeal. “I’ll continue to try to substantiate my allegations even though I’m not part of the Ministry of Correctional Services. There is a lot more to this than just the management-employee question.”
After waging his losing battle, Brewer, a former officer in the American navy, moved back to the United States. He died in 2015.
One observer of Brewer’s ordeal was inspired to write about what he witnessed while working in a training school.
Don Weitz, a former consulting psychologist at Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville, told the Star in a recent interview that he was “appalled” by the mental suffering he was witnessing in children sent to solitary confinement cells — usually concrete-lined rooms about two metres by three metres — when he arrived at the school in 1968.
Back then, solitary confinement was
known as “the digger,” as the only way to possibly escape would be to dig your
way out, students and staff used to say. The official terms for solitary
confinement were “segregation” or “detention.”
“These kids were 8, 9 or 10 years
old, not even in their teens. It was child abuse,” Weitz, now 86, said during
an interview at his Yonge and Eglinton apartment.
'These kids were eight, nine or 10
years old, not even in their teens. It was child abuse'
Don Weitz
Former consulting psychologist at
Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville
Weitz, whose job entailed providing
counselling to young people shortly after they arrived in the training school
system, said students were “clearly traumatized” by their experience in the
digger. He recounted the case of one student, known as “Charlie,” who was sent
to the digger at Pine Ridge in 1968 while exhibiting suicidal behaviour.
Weitz recalled finding Charlie
curled up under his bed in the digger, refusing to speak or even acknowledge
the presence of others.
Weitz and another staff member wrote
a letter to the school’s superintendent strongly urging Charlie’s removal from
Pine Ridge so that the boy could receive proper psychiatric treatment.
“He belonged in an emotionally
secure residential place for children,” said Weitz, who describes himself as an
anti-psychiatry and social justice activist.
His letter received no reply and
Charlie was kept in the digger for another three days, Weitz says.
“After I saw Charlie and what the
superintendent . . . failed to do to protect him, I said, what kind of a place
is this? Why am I working in a place that doesn’t protect kids?” he said.
Shocked by what he was witnessing,
Weitz resigned after a year and a half. But before he left, he surreptitiously
copied out the school’s detention logbook for the years 1965 through 1968.
When William Brewer went public with
his allegations of mistreatment in provincially run training schools, Weitz
decided to break his own silence. He pitched and wrote an article about what he
discovered at Pine Ridge for Toronto Life magazine in 1976.
Don Weitz, a former consulting
psychologist at Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville, says he was
"appalled" by the mental suffering he witnessed in children sent to
solitary confinement cells. (Randy Risling)
“He broke his silence and made an
official complaint, so I said the least I can do is write something to expose
the digger experience, which I consider a form of torture of children,” said
Weitz.
His article revealed that the
records he had copied out showed students were punished with solitary confinement
for the pettiest of transgressions: going AWOL, smoking, fooling around in
church, drawing dirty pictures, and tampering with a window, to name just a
few. Kids exhibiting suicidal tendencies were also sent to the digger.
The logs also recorded the length of
time wards spent in solitary. In 1967, for example, an average of 53 boys were
locked up each month, for an average of one-and-a-half days.
As far as Weitz knows, nothing came
of the article, which appeared in May 1976.
The province continued to send
children to Pine Ridge for another three years before finally closing it in
1979.
Weitz still harbours anger toward
the training school system.
“These kids were abused, dammit, and
the government didn’t protect them.”
By the mid-1980s, the province phased
out training schools as an increasing number of troubled youth transitioned to
alternative forms of treatment, such as group homes. Some training schools,
such as Brookside in Cobourg and the Cecil Facer School in Sudbury, were
converted to youth detention centres following the passing of the federal Young
Offenders Act in 1984.
In 2004, for example, then premier Dalton McGuinty formally apologized to former residents of two Ontario training schools affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church: St. Joseph’s in Alfred, Ont., east of Ottawa, and St. John’s in Uxbridge. The apology came following settlement and benefit payouts to more than 1,000 victims and a massive police investigation that led to hundreds of sex abuse charges and the conviction of more than two dozen Christian brothers.
In 2013, following a $35-million class action against the province, Premier Kathleen Wynne apologized in the legislature for abuse suffered by developmentally disabled residents of the now-closed Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia.
Kenyon Wallace can be reached at kwallace@thestar.ca or 416-869-4734.
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