Trigger warning: religious child abuse
In the fifties and sixties, I went to the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Primary School in the poorest neighbourhood of Middlesbrough, the third poorest town in Britain. Back then it was a school for the slums and probably typical of the time. What made it a bit different was that it taught pupils from Nazareth House, an orphanage run by the Sisters of Nazareth nuns. The home was a massive Victorian pile, more suited to a horror film than a refuge for children.
I don’t recall any Nazareth House youngsters in my class, they were hidden in the B stream. But I do remember a girl in the playground standing alone by the school gate, watching the other kids avoiding her. Her head was shaved bald and her scalp painted purple. I learned later that the Gentian Violet was used against nits. Now it’s condemned as a carcinogen.
An ex-pupil five school years my senior recalls the kids from the home in her class, which was unstreamed at the time. “They were watchful, quiet, they stuck to themselves,” she tells me. Occasionally the whole group would turn up with their hair hacked close to their scalps – again purple with Gentian Violet.
Anne Fothergill, a former inmate, mentions haircuts in her book, Memoirs of a Nazareth House Girl. Her hair was cut off for leaving it unbraided. She remembers polishing the home’s floors and washing the nuns’ wimples in the laundry. But she also describes a happy camaraderie among the girls and has said she holds no grudge against the nuns.
Other former residents are less forgiving.
In August 1998 The Independent newspaper carried an investigation of the nuns including at the Middlesbrough home.
In the article three former residents complained of a harsh regime with everyday cruelty as the norm. There were constant beatings – for wetting the bed for instance. That punishment also included standing in front of the nun’s cell with the soiled bedding on their head or being sat in a galvanized steel bath while two assistants poured buckets of cold water over their head.
The head nun would frequently beat the children with a cricket stump.
The diet consisted entirely of bread and dripping and a ladle of soup.
“I was terrified the whole time and never had a happy day there” one former inmate told the paper.
Origins of a scandal
The Independent reported that over 400 abuse survivors were planning to sue the order.
Complaints were not confined to the Middlesbrough home. The order ran many Nazareth Houses in the rest of the UK and a number have been the subject of abuse cases, including Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Sunderland, Carlisle, Cardiff, Nottingham, Ditton, Wrexham, Bexhill, Plymouth, Swansea, Manchester, Isleworth, as well as four each in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Regular reports to the police and the Church were rarely followed up. As children or adults, the complainants weren’t believed.
Founded in 1851, the order has its headquarters in Hammersmith. By the 1970s they ran dozens of children’s homes in the UK, nearly all called Nazareth House. The order has closed its UK children’s homes but still operates in seven countries: UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Allegations about abuse in the nuns’ care in Britain flared up in 1997, when a former resident of a Scottish home alerted the News of the World, who published a string of articles. A BBC Scotland documentary followed in 1998.
At the same time, concerns were growing in Australia. After a Queensland University report on systematic torture by a different order of nuns, the regional government established the Forde Inquiry in 1998-99 into historical institutional child abuse.
The Inquiry heard from 30 witnesses previously at the Sisters of Nazareth’s Wynnum Nazareth House.
The witnesses related how they supplemented a starvation diet with grass, and scavenged scraps from the bins. The weekly bath had up to 20 girls sharing the same water. Nits were treated with DDT and kerosene, and by shaving heads.
The inquiry found evidence of “excessive corporal punishment” and sexual abuse.
The hearings sparked old memories and former residents, discovering that they might be believed at last, began to speak out. Allegations spread like bushfire, extending to New Zealand and North America.
In the UK the order has been the subject of probes by three inquiries and a crop of civil and criminal cases.
As I trawl through the documents a pattern emerges: random, constant violence by the nuns, a spartan regime and a lack of affection.
Specific abuses appear time and again: force-feeding food and force-feeding the resulting vomit; constant beatings for concocted infringements with whatever implement was at hand; overwork; bathing in Jeye’s Fluid; beatings and humiliations for bed-wetting; inadequate food, education and clothes. And the shaved heads. Sometimes victims alleged sexual abuse by visitors, workers, older children, and even by priests and the nuns themselves.
The nuns refused to return children to their parents, claiming they had been adopted. They told children their parents were dead. Children didn’t know they had siblings – even when they were in the same home. And the degrading name-calling.
Not all former inmates of the Nazareth Houses were unhappy with their treatment. Some posts on social media express gratitude to the nuns for their care. But those voices are drowned out by the hundreds who have become witnesses before inquiries and the courts.
Scotland Inquiry
The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI), launched in 2015, covered the period 1933 – 1984. The probe held a 27-day hearing in 2018-19 on the Sisters of Nazareth, and published a case study of their four Scottish homes: at Aberdeen, Cardonald Glasgow, Lasswade and Kilmarnock.
According to the case study, over the ten years to 2015 there had been 122 abuse complaints to the order; 270 civil actions; 113 police investigations; and four successful criminal prosecutions.
An indication of the regime is shown by the chapter headings in the case study: Physical Abuse; Bed-wetting Practices; Force Feeding; Chores; Washing and Bathing; Emotional Abuse; Sexual Abuse.
Over 20 witnesses gave testimony to the inquiry about the Aberdeen home. They were force-fed their own vomit and were locked in cupboards for not cleaning shoes properly.
Witnesses also testified to sexual abuse among many assaults of the inmates. A survivor related how she told a priest in confession that a nun had sexually abused her. He marched her to the same nun, repeated her confessional statement, and then raped her over a table with the nun holding down her arms.
The SCAI concluded that children at the homes had suffered physical and sexual abuse, force-feeding and humiliation.
On publishing the findings on the Nazareth Houses in May 2019, the Chair Lady Smith said, “There was sexual abuse of children which, in some instances, reached levels of the utmost depravity.”
The Nazareth Houses were “places of fear, hostility and confusion” she said.
Northern Ireland Inquiry
In Northern Ireland the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI) which reported in 2017, investigated four Nazareth House homes in Northern Ireland: Portadown, Derry, Termonbacca Co. Derry, and Nazareth Lodge in Belfast.
After bed-wetting the children were forced to put the soiled sheets on their heads.
Girls at Derry were known by numbers rather than names. They were bathed in disinfectant and when they were ill made to eat their own vomit. A girl was forced to unblock a toilet by clearing the faeces with her bare hand.
The witnesses’ barrister also testified:
- No contact with social workers;
- Sexual abuse by older children, priests, employees and on one occasion a nun.
- Inadequate food and force feeding.
- Poor staffing and lack of medical attention.
- Christmas presents seized
In 1997 it took three police complaints over two years before an employee accused of sexual abuse was sacked.
Some witnesses from the Belfast homes testified that they had been abused by the convicted paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.
At the Inquiry the Sisters of Nazareth spokesperson accepted that children in their care had been abused.
IICSA Sexual Abuse Inquiry
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) ran from 2014, in the wake of the Savile scandal, to 2022. The inquiry took evidence from 600 witnesses of whom 94 were survivors.
Forced migration to Australia
The Child Migration Programme was a special subject of investigation by all three inquiries.
Between 1938 and 1956 the Catholic Church sent 775 children to Australia through the Sisters of Nazareth.
The required parental consent for emigration was obtained in only a low proportion of cases.
Eight of the migrated children alleged sexual abuse with 6 assaults within the order. A girl was raped on the voyage.
The IICSA Inquiry found that,
“…the Sisters of Nazareth did not take sufficient care to protect its child migrants from the risk of sexual abuse.”
There was no evidence of a reporting system on the child migrants, and no monitoring at all of children the Sisters sent to other orders.
Before they left the UK the children were promised a fantastical life and that they would “ride to school on ponies.”
The reality could not have been more different.
A former child migrant told the BBC that, as an illegitimate infant, her mother was pressured to place her in the “cruel and joyless” Middlesbrough Nazareth House. The nuns told her mother she was happily adopted.
The nuns told the child she was going on a day trip when she was shipped off to Australia with 27 other girls. She ended up at a Sisters of Mercy orphanage, where her personal possessions were seized except for the Bible. She was beaten constantly with a strap and forced to do unpaid work, farmed out as a skivvy during the school holidays. She was sexually assaulted on the voyage and also at a sheep shearing station where she was working, aged 15.
The IICSA report presents the case study of a witness born in 1942. He was taken into the Nazareth House Romsey, Hampshire, then the Hammersmith home. For a year he was raped every week by a priest and violently sexually abused by an older boy. He was beaten by the nuns and suffered a serious head injury after a nun threw him down the stairs.
The Sisters refused to hand him back to his mother when she married, telling her he’d been adopted. They told him he was an orphan.
The witness was migrated to Australia in 1953 where he was sent to the Christian Brothers. He was beaten on day two for wetting the bed. Electric shocks were applied to his penis for bedwetting. He was beaten for not working hard enough. A special punishment was being forced to watch horses being killed.
The boy was sexually abused by a visitor. He was taken to a farm and raped. He was also raped by a Brother whom he described as “a sadistic paedophile”.
The Sisters of Nazareth contributed money to the Beyond Healing project, Australia’s redress scheme to help former child migrants.
The then Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology in 2010 to the surviving migrants.
The Sisters of Nazareth had five of their own children’s homes in Australia. A report by an Australian Royal Commission found 48 accusations of sexual abuse. Gerald Ridsdale, notorious in Australia as a paedophile, was a chaplain at the Ballarat home.
The order contributes to the Australian National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.
Court action
There have been numerous civil and criminal cases around the UK.
For example, three civil actions in Scotland were raised against the order’s leadership in 2000. According to the House of Lords appeal in 2007, there were about 290 other actions at the same time on similar grounds against the same defenders.
A stumbling block to litigation has been the time limitation on child abuse cases. The 2000 Scottish action was rejected not on the evidence but on the time bar.
A complainant could only lodge an action up to three years above their age of majority of 18, i.e. 21. Yet abuse victims take years to process their trauma and the majority of complainants are above that age threshold. The Scottish Parliament removed the time bar in 2017. It remains in England and Wales, but its removal is a recommendation of the IICSA inquiry.
In 2000, Sister Alphonso (aka Marie Docherty) of the Aberdeen home was convicted on four counts of cruel and unnatural treatment against 15 children in the period 1965-73. For example, she pulled a girl off a swing by the hair, swung her round and threw her into a wall, breaking all her front teeth.
The judge said she would be “admonished” rather than serve a prison term, due to her age and her health.
No Sister of Nazareth has yet to see the inside of a prison cell.
Church response
In November 2020 the IICSA published an Investigation Report: Safeguarding in the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. The report stated:
“Child sexual abuse was swept under the carpet. Resistance to external intervention was widespread.”
Despite the flood of complaints about Nazareth Houses, the Catholic Church initially presented a brick wall to the survivors. Archbishop of Scotland, Mario Conti, told the 1998 BBC Scotland documentary that “There are some people before whom lawyers have been dangling a pot of gold” but at the IICSA hearing he apologised.
Lady Smith countered comments that witnesses were lying:
“It was suggested in evidence that applicants may have colluded to present fictitious accounts about their time in care, fuelled by resentment towards their families and an appetite for compensation. I reject all such suggestions.”
A defence of the nuns has been that such abuse was typical of all institutions at the time. But even in the 1950s the homes were shocking.
Kathleen Forrest, a Ministry of Home Affairs Inspector, after visiting the four Northern Ireland homes, wrote in a 1953 report:
“I find these homes utterly depressing and it appals me to think that these hundreds of children are being reared in bleak lovelessness.”
Moreover, the time period of abuse (that we know of) extends to 1997.
In 2017, the Irish Catholic Church’s National Board for Safeguarding Children published a review of the order’s safeguarding in the four Northern Ireland homes plus one in the Republic.
They reported that 294 physical and emotional abuse allegations were made against 61 nuns in the order, none of whom were convicted.
The Board commented on the paucity of records held by the nuns and complained the order was, “exceptionally slow to take up their responsibility for child safeguarding.”
The report also brought up the “Directory” – a manual written for the nuns in 1921. Here we see mention of severe punishments involving canes and whips, an obsession with extreme cleanliness, and an insistence on keeping children’s hands above the bedcovers. Although updated in the last century, could this document be the source of the culture of sadism?
The storm rumbles on.
In December 2022, a survivor of sexual and physical abuse at the Nazareth House in Nottingham was awarded £75,000 in a civil action. The abuse took place in the 1970s and 1980s.
Also at the Nottingham home but in an unrelated case, Steven McNally, a former manager, was sentenced on 20 January this year to 26 years in prison for child abuse.
In February last year, the Sisters were ordered by the court to pay £250,000 to a man who was abused at Nazareth Lodge, Belfast between 1989 and 1996.
The Scotland and Northern Ireland inquiries led to the establishment of redress schemes which help former residents to access information, get closure and receive compensation.
The Sisters of Nazareth contribute financially to the schemes. They can afford to. Formerly known as the Poor Sisters of Nazareth they dropped the “Poor” some years ago. Their charity report shows their income from investments alone in the year to March 2023 was £561,730.
The IICSA recommended a redress scheme for England and Wales but It has yet to be established.
By the time it does launch, more victims will have died, stress-related diseases taking their toll on lives scarred by early trauma. Some have taken their own lives.
The Sisters of Nazareth are not alone. Other orders (like the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. at Smyllum and their alleged 400 unmarked graves) have also drawn horrified attention.
The All Party Parliamentary Group.reported in 2020 that there has been an “epidemic” of institutional child abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, with inadequate access for survivors to support and justice.
The Sisters of Nazareth closed their UK doors to children some years ago, as minors were sent into foster care instead and the stigma of illegitimacy faded. The order turned to running care homes for the elderly.
The Middlesbrough building is now a care home for the elderly run by an independent company.
The order was successfully fined £40,000 in 2019 for the death of an elderly resident at their Bonnyrigg care home. The zimmer frame user had fallen down the stairs.
The nuns still have a nursery in Lancaster and children’s homes in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
There remains a question: if kids at my school could notice worrying things about the Nazareth House children – why did the teachers ignore the purple scalps, the withdrawn, watchful behaviour? Perhaps, as with Savile, everyone knew something, but no-one knew everything. And no-one dared challenge the nuns.
Update March 2026
Two nuns in Glasgow were found guilty of multiple counts of historic abuse. They both avoided jail.
The National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has a guide on their website to spotting signs of child abuse together with special advice for teachers.
