A pervasive climate of fear
I’ve been reading the Goldenbridge chapter of the Ryan report again. (Reading the whole report will be the work of months, if not years.) One thing (among others) struck me anew…
Sr Alida recalls her early years in religious life as being dominated by fear. On reflection she cannot understand how she accepted so many demands and pressures without protest. (7.219)
Exactly. This is how authoritarian religions work, after all, and Catholicism is nothing if not authoritarian – still, now, let alone in Ireland in the 1940s. Sister ‘Alida’ was trained by fear and she passed it on to the children she was in charge of.
The religious sisters who subsequently held management responsibility lived in a tightly controlled and authoritarian world. Questioning was defined as arrogance and led to blaming of the individual…No distinction appears to have been made between being a ‘good’ religious and being a ‘good’ childcare worker. The characteristics that were valued appear to have been obedience and dedication…The unsafe world of Goldenbridge developed a very particular culture which could not meet the needs of children. Very powerless people had enormous and immediate power over troubled and troublesome children. The abuse of the power and powerlessness was almost inevitable. (7.224)
In other words, a recipe for a disastrous way to take care of desolate children: fear, control, authoritarianism, slavishness, sadism, all gathered together into ‘enormous and immediate power’: the perfect nightmare.
Overall, there was a high level of severe corporal punishment in Goldenbridge, resulting in a pervasive climate of fear in the Institution. (7.232)
Yes but not just a pervasive climate of fear…Along with that climate, and inseparable from it, was a pervasive climate of unlove, of hostility, of anger…of hatred.
This is perhaps too obvious to point out, but a pervasive climate of fear created by a harshly punitive regime is inevitably also a pervasive climate of unlove – and that’s what was truly corrosive about Goldenbridge (and the other industrial schools). Reading the report, you just can’t escape that; it jumps off every page. There was no love there, and there was abundant fury and violence and frank hatred. The witnesses all say the same thing – they all felt utterly alone there, they had no one to turn to, that was the worst thing.
Hatred needs to be recognized as such. The pervasive climate of fear at Goldenbridge wasn’t just a matter of excessively harsh discipline. It’s possible to be both loving and strict, even ‘strict’ in the sense of using some corporal punishment…but there is a cut-off point. There is a point at which quantity becomes quality, and the corporal punishment is no longer compatible with anything that can be called love. This applies, mutatis mutandis, to ‘honour’ killings and forced marriage too. Whether God hates women or not, some of God’s fans certainly do hate women, and act accordingly. That needs to be acknowledged.
As an adjunct to this, right now we are seeing TV interviews with people in the streets of Iranian cities. Some women supporters of Ahmadinejad have strident in their support of (what they percieve as) his defiance of the West.
In a country where ‘adulterous’ women are routinely given public hangings, any defiance of the existing male-dominated power structure can be dangerous, and defiance of Islam very much so.
Defying the US, the West and supporting Ahmadinejad they see as worthwhile. Supporting a man who represents the instiutions and forces subtracting so much from their lives at least gives them an outlet for defiance per se. Being so re something is probably better than being a total all-round submissive.
I have heard of studies of survivors of Nazi death camps which indicate that when inmates were able to find the tiniest opportunity for independent initiative they had a basis on which to start an underground movement in the camp. Which is why I suppose the authoritarian instinct seeking repression finds its logical end in total repression.
Goldenbridge convent nuns were not allowed to have any contact with children in the industrial school. This fact sadly separates it from other industrial schools. However, other industrial school inmates, in far off flung rural areas, were not allowed to have any contact with children in the boarding schools within the same grounds. These children, though, had more access to the nuns in their respective convents, as they worked directly with them in the institutions. They had to wash and clean the bed-linen of the boarders – just as we had to do with the bed-linen, etc, belonging to the nuns in GB convent.
The GB management staff, which comprised of two nuns, also had the added responsibility of teaching the children. The asylum, was thus run by the asylum inmates who were so institutionalised and incapable of managing their own lives – that they could not enter the outside world. Charming really!
Children in Goldenbridge never experienced nuns, throughout their whole childhoods, eating food, washing themselves, combing their hair, or doing normal things parents do in front of their offspring. They were always intrigued about this aspect of the religious?!
Marie-Therese: survive a childhood in a monstrous institution like that and you can survive just about anything. That I guess is one consolation open to you.
Some believe that suffering is good for the soul, but I doubt it.
My own opinion is that the Catholic Church has done enough evil to justify being closed down for good. Literally. For the good of us all.
Yeah, Ian, to quote Kahlil Gibran.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
So indecipherable!
When most adults suffer, they can mostly work out in their minds some logical reasons for their sufferings. Children, on the other hand, who suffer, and who have not got any caring adults to soothe them, find it so utterly incomprehensible, as they have not got the mental wherewithal to deal with their pain. Children, as a consequence, who suffer over long periods, learn to switch off in ways that children who do not suffer as much do not. The former become affectionless thieves.
‘Sister ‘Alida’ was trained by fear and she passed it on to the children she was in charge of.”
Yes, that would be the sum of it – the person who trained her was called by another sister a paranoid schizophrenic. The trainer was cruel to adults, nuns in the convent and children in the industrial school. She was allowed a free rein to run riot and cause mayhem everywhere she appeared. And the legacy of that fear was enacted on defenceless human beings of my ilk.
One survives – but the quality of life is minimal as they do not contain the joy for too long the Gibran says they do indeed.
Or as the old Chinese proverb puts it : “a swallow which has not known a harsh winter cannot enjoy the warmth of spring.”
Such sayings use a pythonesque ‘always look on the bright side’ approach to avoid facing the loss of what might have been. In reality, the past is always with us in memory, whether glorious or barbaric. All birds that survive the winter (and here in SE Australia, 75% of them don’t) can enjoy fine spring weather.
For some reason, despite their promotion by various gurus, beds of nails just never caught on.
Children in Goldenbridge (throughout their whole childhoods,m excepting pets) never ever had human beings put their arms around them to comfort them. The only times children’s hands held those of the nuns were, when they were laid out bare to be flogged by the religious.
Sebastian Barry, in his The Secret Scripture, draws attention to the point at which pain becomes permanent and an abused young person loses the potential to shape their own lives – that distinguishing capacity which, as Ted Kennedy once said, defines us as human.
“There is a moment in the history of every beaten child,” writes Barry, “when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.
This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history.”
The most formative years of their lives were robbed of them indeed.
Thanks, Ian, for your comment.
Oops, Terry Prone – journalist, stated Sebastian Barry, etc…
Yes, that’s what I meant about the pervasive climate of unlove. The whole chapter reeks of it. It’s so…awful.
How long can we hang on?
How long can survivors of institutional abuse hang on when they know that the perpetrators of abuse in Ireland’s industrial schools of the past, almost got away scot-free. The religious fought tooth and nail in the court to have their names not mentioned in the Ryan Report. They won out as per usual! The Christian Brothers, too, only a couple of days before the publication of the RR, wrote to the commission, saying very little abuse occurred to children in care in their institutions. When they were found out – they rescinded and apologised profusely to survivors. How farcical! How conflictual! Mind-boggling of staggering proportions!
Not only have the CB’s tried unremittingly to mischievously obfuscate consequential criminal issues with their prevarications apropos survivors and the commission over a decade (and sadly the past) – they have put their funds into trusts to safeguard their assets.
BTW, on a more devious note, post RR, one of the Christian Brothers in a top position even had the temerity to phone up an innocent sexual abuse survivor, who, heretofore, the order he belonged to, had been relentlessly saying to the survivor that he was telling fibs and invited him to tea in the parlour. The CB told him that his order was so utterly sorry for disbelieving his story and asked for forgiveness. By Jove, I say, rather, tea with the enemy! The traumatised survivor was so over the moon at the mere thought of one the predecessors of his abusers selecting him personally to have tea – that he went sofort out to the outfitters to buy himself a new suit for the occasion. Say no more! I hope the tea-party went well? Like hell, I do, The hypocrisy of these Machiavellian master manipulators beggars belief. The survivor was like putty in the hands of the religious just like survivors were when they were incarcerated as children in their institutions.
Survivors who went to the redress board have been gagged if they talk publicly about their cases. So how long can they hang on allowing these kind of injustices to go on indeed? The religious have all the power and media PR skills. I believe, as long as intellectual people in the whole world continue to ignore these issue survivors have no choice but to hang on, we have been yet again been forsaken and re sentenced. The educated people of this world have a duty to speak out on our behalf – they have the language and the expertise and by their silence they also become our tormenters by association. I would urge all concerned people to get in contact with Archbishop Diarmud Martin and Cardinal Brady and An Taoiseach Brian Cowen, (whose addresses can be easily googled) and express your horror of the contents of the RR. Survivors in the main are not educated enough to know that they should not be drinking tea with the religious at this moment in time as the latter have not repented fully for the sins of their religious forebears.
I am also thoroughly disgusted that in recent times British society was more concerned with the bad behavior of their elected members than that of bad behaviour of religious in industrial schools in the past. Methinks that it was has deliberate (modus operandi) in quelling the report as it probably does not want floodgates opening up on its own doorstep.
When do our fingernails break?
When we read stories on butterfliesandwheels.com about bleeding fingers, calloused fingers and deformed fingers from perpetual sucking of fingers of children, who self-soothed themselves, while having well-earned breaks from making rosary beads in a secret rosary beads factory in religious-run, Goldenbridge industrial school. The fingernails of Ophelia Benson are recurrently broken in her pursuit to write about injustices bestowed on children and women in the third world and Ireland. Rock on, OB, by your deeds you will be known. Check out ‘In Focus’ ‘CICA Report’ @ Homepage @ butterfliesandwheels.com. Originally posted at Maddy Bunting’s Guardian CiF.
The Catholic Church in England and Wales is currently celebrating *Year for Priests,* would this be de raison d’être” for ignoring the Ryan Report in GB? Help?
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=16325