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Saturday, March 08, 2008

Ex-pupil's 48 hours of hell at Good Shepherd centre

A former pupil at an abuse scandal residential school claims she was locked naked in a punishment room for two days.

She said yesterday she was stripped, forced to sleep on a freezing concrete slab and had to urinate in a steel bucket.

The Good Shepherd Centre is being probed over an ex-worker's claims that girl pupils were mistreated.

And yesterday a 49-year-old woman - who was 13 when she was sent to the school - said the abuse was going on as far back as the 1970s, when the Good Shepherd was run by nuns.

The woman said her shoes and socks were taken away from her the minute she walked through the door of the Good Shepherd.

She added: "I had to do without them for three months - this was to stop me running away.

"We also had a punishment room which we called the detention room, but it was like a prison cell and the girls who didn't obey the nuns were stripped and locked up naked.

"If you refused to take your clothes off, they would throw you on the floor, hold you down and haul your clothes off. It was humiliating and degrading.

"Inside the detention room there was a steel bucket to pee in, an old army blanket and a cold slab to sleep on.

"The feeling of being locked up in there for 48 hours will never leaveme. I shudder to this day."

The woman claimed that if any girl held in the room asked for anything or complained about the cold, the nuns would beat them with a cane or slap and punch them.

The centre is no longer run by nuns but by the Cora Foundation, a Catholic charitable organisation who take in girls referred by councils.

Full story at the Daily Record.

Photo: Celtic cross and church

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