A police officer patrols the grounds around the Haut de la Garenne youth hostel yesterday. (0541378)
THE disturbing discovery of a child’s remains at the former Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey prompted many phone calls to the Guernsey Press yesterday.
Members of the public, from on and off the island, raised concerns of what they called a consistent lack of information and statistics on child abuse, with many saying they knew of cases in Guernsey where the perpetrator had never been caught, free to abuse again.
While they felt the disclosure of the information was in the public interest, they also feared it was a closed-door situation, with the truth covered up for decades by the powers-that-be.
But when asked for statistics and information on children who had been adopted to and from Guernsey to Jersey over the years, and in particular had been resident in Haut de la Garenne, the Health and Social Services Department was unable to help.
It was also unable to release figures on allegations of sexual abuse of children under the department’s care.
‘The Health and Social Services Department treats any allegations of abuse seriously and will co-operate with the police on any investigation into claims of abuse, both past and present,’ said a statement it issued yesterday.
‘It is not possible to provide detailed statistics as requested because of the complexities of extracting such information from very old paper records.
‘The only way of confirming the number of people affected would be to go through the individual records with the person concerned.’
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3 Article Comments
there must be no hiding place for the scum who covered up
this evil act. ifor one wil never again set foot on your islands
and lets hope most of the Uk feel the same, may god forgive you, i wont ever
You are ill-advised to tar the Islands and their collective inhabitants with the same brush - the responsibility lies in the hands of a small percentage, who should be brought to justice. However, if making comments, you are strongly advised to make use of properly constructed English, capital letters and punctuation.
agree with JG Harding. Whilst there are admittedly more weirdo’s per capita in Guersney than any place on on on Earth, comments like this will put an already struggling island into complete doom.