Mount Cashel public inquiry, PBS Divided Memories

from http://ritualabuse.us

Mount Cashel abuse victim calls for public inquiry - Richard Foot, Canwest News Service 5/24/09 A survivor of Canada's worst child abuse scandal is calling for a public inquiry into the horrors inflicted on boys at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland, as well as other Christian Brothers institutions across the country....The St. John's survivor, who lived at the now-defunct Mount Cashel orphanage during the 1950s, is a well-known Newfoundland professional and community volunteer who managed against all odds to build a life for himself, despite being savagely beaten and sexually abused as a boy. He is now one of 50 Mount Cashel survivors with civil suits still before the courts....Doe says the conditions and suffering described by the report out of Ireland read like a "mirror image" of his time in Mount Cashel....From 1989-1990, a Newfoundland royal commission, led by retired Ontario judge Samuel Hughes, did investigate the Mount Cashel scandal; however, its work was focused only on a police coverup of the abuses and on a select group of victims housed in the orphanage in the 1970s and 80s....Between 1996 and 2004, $27 million was paid by the Newfoundland government and the Christian Brothers in compensation to roughly 100 Mount Cashel victims. Another $8.5 million was paid over the same period, by the Catholic order and the government of Ontario, to survivors of Christian Brothers schools in Ontario.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1626064


This project began as a letter to PBS which objected to false statements made by Ms. Ofra Bikel, producer of the program "Divided Memories." That letter described how an undergraduate Research Assistant at Brown University found half a dozen corroborated cases of recovered memory in just a few hours of electronic database searching, disproving Ms. Bikel's claim to the contrary (Cheit, 1995). PBS did not defend Ms. Bikel's claim that "she could not find any" corroborated cases of recovered memory in her allegedly extensive search. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/Recovmem/purpose.html