Abused girls' institution trauma

By Madeleine Hamilton (Eureka Street via CNUA)

On Fridays, when I push my two preschoolers in their double stroller to the Preston market, I pass the Anglicare office in Murray Road. Outside is a billboard featuring a miserable, heavily-mascaraed teenage girl and the message, ‘Foster care: Changing her life … and yours.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I always think sadly, ‘we just can’t.’

With a chronic shortage of foster families ‹ particularly ones prepared to accept ‘damaged’ adolescents ‹ the prospect of a stable home for girls like the one on the billboard is slight. However, the present system in Victoria ‹ whereby adolescent girls at risk of abuse and neglect are placed by the Department of Human Services (in partnership with agencies such as Anglicare) in either kinship, foster, or residential care ‹ reflects an evolution in youth justice and child protection policies.

In the past, such girls were frequently sent to the Winlaton Youth Training Centre in Nunawading. This institution was established by the State Government in 1956 to contain female juvenile criminal offenders, wards of the state, and girls under protection orders (those deemed ‘uncontrollable’ or ‘in moral danger’). Many already had long experiences in orphanages.

Unlike their male counterparts, ‘delinquent’ girls who repeatedly ran away from violent, dangerous environments were frequently incarcerated because it was perceived that they might be sexually active and fall pregnant. Rather than being offered safe and therapeutic alternative homes, they were placed in an under-resourced, overcrowded institution and treated like a difficult herd to be ‘managed’. Regardless of the state’s intention to protect and rehabilitate, Victoria’s most vulnerable girls were punished for the transgressions perpetrated against them.

Before a series of significant reforms undertaken by Winlaton’s management in the mid-1970s restricted such intrusive and humiliating practices, new ‘trainees’ were routinely de-loused, strip-searched, and scalded in boiling Phenol baths. They were also bussed to a clinic in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, to be checked for any signs of venereal disease or pregnancy.

For Joan (name changed), who spent her entire adolescence in Winlaton after being made a ward of the state in 1964 at age 12, the psychological impact of being internally examined by an unsympathetic doctor has been long-lasting: ‘What on earth were they looking for at 12? If you cry, you’re told to shut up. To me that’s sexual assault.’ A habitual absconder, Joan was subjected to the same traumatic process each time the police returned her to Winlaton.

The callousness and brutality of the institution did very little to rehabilitate girls who had run away ‹ or been officially removed ‹ from abusive and dysfunctional families. After hitchhiking from Brisbane to Melbourne in the early 1960s to escape her alcoholic parents, 13-year-old Karen* was soon picked up by police off the city streets. From the Russell Street cells, she was taken to Winlaton. There she recalls being belted with ‘wet sand shoes’, locked in her room, and forcefully injected with tranquillisers. To perhaps scare her straight, she was once sent for a couple of nights to the Fairlea Women’s Prison.

For Gillian(name changed), who was admitted to Winlaton in 1972 at age 15 following a suicide attempt, the few months she spent there were characterised by utter boredom, punishments such as being forced to scrub the recreation room floor with a toothbrush, and neglect. After falling ill, she was ignored for days until she was finally rushed by ambulance to hospital. A strep infection had evolved into rheumatic fever ‹ an illness usually only diagnosed in the most poverty-stricken, overcrowded communities of Australia. She suffered permanent heart damage as a result.

With little education or meaningful recreation offered, some girls sought to alleviate their boredom through violence. Merlene Fawdry (name changed) recalls in her memoir, The Little Mongrel, that in the remand section ‘there were no books to read, newspapers and radios were not allowed, so inmates just sat around and talked. This often led to disagreements and fights, where frustration and futility gave power to fists and feet and teeth.’

Tattooing was another common way to pass the time and rebel against ‘the screws’, but the future employment prospects and self-esteem of Winlaton girls were compromised by these amateur inkings.

For many of the women who spent time as juveniles in Winlaton in the 1960s and early ’70s, life has been far from easy. Gillian supported a heroin addiction by working St Kilda’s streets as a prostitute, Joan endured decades of agonising separation from the daughter she was forced to relinquish as a 16-year-old, and Karen escaped both her family and institutions by marrying at 17. After years of feeling like ‘a reject from the conveyor belt of life’ Fawdry regained her self-esteem by mothering seven children and qualifying as a youth social worker.

A tiny sample of the hundreds of adolescent girls who passed through Winlaton and survived into adulthood, these women demonstrate the wide-ranging effects of ruptured family life and subsequent institutionalisation. They also express a common hope that their stories may prevent the future unnecessary incarceration of vulnerable youth.

Though subjected to sexual double standards, and confused messages in mainstream and social media regarding the value of young women’s bodies, rebellious Victorian girls who are possibly sexually active are no longer routinely punished with institutionalisation. For this, at least, we can be grateful. The ongoing problem of providing meaningful care to abused and neglected girls is, however, an ongoing conundrum.

Madeleine Hamilton is an historian, blogger, and the co-author of Sh*t On My Hands: A down and dirty companion to early parenthood. Madeleine thanks the Care Leavers of Australia Network (CLAN) for its assistance in locating interviewees. She is keen to talk to more Winlaton care leavers, especially those who spent time in the institution between 1974 and its closure in 1993. –http://www.eurekastreet.com.au