"Royal Commission: Witness tells of having teeth shattered against sink"
- Details
- Category: Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse Allegations
- Created: Friday, 28 February 2014 11:31
- Written by SMH - Rachel Browne - Social Affairs Reporter
When Wilma Robb was transferred from Parramatta Girls Training School to the notoriously brutal Institution for Girls in Hay as a 15-year-old, she vividly recalls being told what to expect.
“Welcome to Hay,” the officer told her. “We will either make you or break you. Your choice.”
Speaking at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Mrs Robb described the harsh discipline at the state-run jail as a psychological experiment.
“It was designed to break the human spirit and it certainly did break the human spirit,” she said.
“Welfare said it was an experiment. Well, they need to be here to see what that experiment did to us girls. . . we're all screwed up. We can't live a normal life and never will.”
Girls as young as 13 were forced to perform hard physical labour, they had to look at the ground and were forbidden from speaking to each other.
Everything from food to toilet paper was strictly rationed.
The girls were forced to march everywhere and were severely punished if they did not sleep in the correct position on their right side with their hands visible.
She told the hearing before Justice Peter McClellan of being thrown into the isolation cell at Hay in the middle of winter and spending the entire night on a concrete floor, tearing out every single hair on her legs.
“I'd like to know what public servant could write those rules and expect someone to co
me out of a place like that undamaged,” she said.
Mrs Robb, a long time campaigner for people who endured abuse in state-run institutions, was in Parramatta Girls Training School and its maximum security annexe at Hay between 1962 and 1965.
The 67-year-old told the hearing of being physically and sexually assaulted at both Parramatta and Hay.
At Parramatta, she was beaten so badly by staff that all her teeth were shattered.
“They smashed my face into the sink of the shower block,” she said. “I was then told to clean up the mess. At the age of 15. I required full set of dentures.”
She said at Parramatta girls were forced to strip naked in front of staff and other inmates, and she was drugged with the strong sedative Largactil on a daily basis.
“Largactil made me feel like a zombie,” she said.
She said the child welfare system of the time failed the young people it was supposed to protect and called on the NSW Government to offer greater support to victims of abuse in state-run homes.
“It's time they fronted up as our guardians and looked after us,” she said.
