Nun Broke Child’s Arm for Reporting Sexual Abuse by Pedophile Priest
8-year-old girl's attempts to report sex abuse were violently punished
© Neon Nettle / Press
An 8-year-old child had her arm broken by a nun in a violent attack after trying to report that she was being sexually abused by a Catholic priest, a court has heard.
A witness has told a jury that she plucked up the courage to tell the nun that she was being raped by the pedophile priest, who reacted by calling her a "wh*re" before throwing her into a wall and breaking her arm.
Theresa Tolmie-McGrane said she hoped the nun would protect her if she reported the pedophilia to her, but instead she reacted by giving her "a good hiding."
After her first arm was broken by by one nun, a second nun then gave her an additional beating and threatened to break her other arm should tell anyone else about the abuse, the inquiry heard.
Ms. Tolmie-McGrane waived her right to anonymity at the Scottish child abuse inquiry to recount a catalog of other abuses during her 11 years at Smyllum Park Catholic orphanage in Lanark, South Lanarkshire, which closed in the 1980s.
Aside from the sexual abuse, children were subject to beatings, humiliations, freezing showers, being force-fed inedible food, being told to eat their own vomit and having their mouths rinsed out with soap.
Metro reports: The witness told the hearing in Edinburgh how she arrived at the institution, run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, at the age of six in 1968 after an abusive early childhood. She recounted how, about two years later, she had a job dusting pews in the church.
One particular priest would arrive early and ask her to sit on his lap, before progressing to making her perform a sex act on him or watch as he did so, the inquiry heard.
"He said ‘I need you to be a soldier of God, a good little soldier’," she told the inquiry, adding the abuse went on for several months.
On one occasion, a nun walked into the room as it was happening, she said.
She told the hearing: "I thought ‘praise the Lord, she’s seeing this, she’s going to be angry with him and protect me’.
"Her whole face became distorted.
"I thought ‘she’s angry with him’, (but) she was angry with me.
"She called me a whore, she took my left arm and yanked me out of his lap and flung me across to the wall (and said) … 'get the f*** out of here'."
She told how she crawled away and had to go back to church, but when another nun found out she could not raise her arm she was given "a real hiding."
"I said I couldn’t lift my arm, my arm hurt. I said (a nun) has broken my arm," Ms. Tolmie-McGrane said.
She told the inquiry how the second nun took her to hospital but warned her: "Don’t you dare tell anybody what happened, young lady or I’ll break your other arm" and assured her she would be "lying to protect a man of God, so it’s okay to lie."
Ms. Tolmie-McGrane, who later went to Glasgow University and now works in Norway as a psychologist, told the inquiry she was at Smyllum from 1968 until 1979.
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She described how, on her first night there, she was slapped after waking up screaming from a nightmare, then forced into a freezing cold shower for wetting the bed.
If a child vomited, they would have their faces rubbed in it or be told to eat it, she said.
The witness also described beatings at the hands of nuns, sometimes with the crosses they wore.
"I would say every child at some point would have been hit with a cross," she said.
Children would be made to sleep in soiled sheets for two or three nights as a punishment for bed-wetting, she said, and when they went on an annual holiday to Ayrshire, they would end up badly burnt and blistered from the sun.
The inquiry also heard how one girl would run away often but never return after being run over by a car one day.
Ms. Tolmie-McGrane told the inquiry she approached police officers visiting Smyllum on two occasions to tell them "the nuns are hurting me" but was "marched back in" to the institution on both occasions and then beaten by a nun.
Injuries from her time at Smyllum included a facial scar and broken tooth from being "slammed into a wall," broken fingers from being hit with a hairbrush and a broken tailbone from having a seat pulled out from underneath her when she was sitting down.
"I have, unfortunately, physical scars, not just emotional ones," she told the hearing.
