|
|
Allegations of Abuse
in Institutions |
|
|
|
|
Wellington: Today’s standards
should not be applied to orphanages in the 1960s and ’70s, the lawyer defending
Catholic organisations from a $550,000 abuse claim said yesterday. In the High Court at Wellington,
lawyer Chris Finlayson said a huge injustice would be done if today’s
standards were applied to the care given and discipline at St Josephs Orphanage,
Upper Hutt, in the 1960s and ’70s. Mr Finlayson was acting for the
Sisters of Mercy (Wellington) Trust Board and St Josephs Orphanage Trust
Board, which are defending claims a former orphanage girl has made about her
care there in 1968-73. She wants $550,000 from them and
from Wellington’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese and its social services agency,
Catholic Social Services. Mr Finlayson said the law could
not get involved in minor incidents of perceived unkindness, harshness or
indignities. Only two allegations against the
Sisters of Mercy were serious, he said — that a nun had slapped the
claimant’s ear so that her eardrum burst and that she was knocked unconscious
several times by blows to the head. Both claims have been denied and
the ear injury claim was made too late to succeed legally. The case was really about the
woman’s mistaken perceptions, Mr Finlayson said. Though some of what she believed
might have remote foundations in minor incidents, her psychological disabilities
meant she had unwittingly constructed a fiction to explain her distress about
her early life. The woman and her six siblings
were put in care when her parents’ marriage broke up. The nuns’ duty was to give her
food, shelter and clothing and send her to school, and that was done. Wider
legal duties were denied, Mr Finlayson said. "On the facts of this case,
the sisters at St Josephs had no choice as to whether a child was to be there
at all, or whether the child ought to be cared for another way. "They were simply responding
to the fact that this child, however unfortunate she might have been, had
simply been deposited with them by her mother." |
