The Ontario government has secretly settled hundreds of lawsuits alleging historic sexual, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and staff at provincially run schools for troubled youth, a Star investigation has found.

Staff and teachers were accused of sodomizing students, forcing them to perform oral sex, and pushing them to engage in “scrambles,” a sort of fight club where students were encouraged to beat one another.

The Star’s investigation has uncovered 220 legal settlements in which the province made payouts to victims ranging from several thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a condition of settlement, victims had to sign confidentiality agreements, what some former residents, now in their late 50s, referred to as “gag orders.”

“The government doesn’t want people knowing what they did to us,” said Steven Greenwood, a former student at a school in Hagersville.

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Province ignored whistleblowers who warned about child abuse at its training schools

Each of these young boys and girls had been sent by Ontario court judges and provincial government officials between 1960 and 1984 to “training schools” — residential institutions in places such as Simcoe, Bowmanville and Cobourg. These young people, many from broken families, struggling with poverty, or addicted to drugs, had been deemed “unmanageable” or “incorrigible.”

Today, most of the schools have been abandoned, torn down or converted to housing, while a few have been retrofitted as youth correctional facilities.

As recently as 1984, training schools were in use in Ontario and former residents say they were the scenes of horrible acts by teachers and staff members.

“There were a lot of warped minds in these schools,” said former student Greenwood, 56. While many cases have been settled, Greenwood’s is still before the courts. He is suing the province for physical, sexual and emotional abuse he alleges he suffered at both Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville and Sprucedale Training School in Hagersville in the late 1970s.

The statements of claim list the province as defendant, and often name individual teachers, though typically only the last names of teachers or staff are listed, as students never knew their full names, or can’t remember. In all the court files the Star examined, none contained a statement of defence from the province.

The provincial government has told the Star it will not comment on the settlements. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, which manages youth corrections for the province, told the Star that “as there are matters before the courts relating to these schools, it would be inappropriate” to comment.

In a statement sent to the Star late Thursday, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said “no child should ever have to experience that kind of trauma” and that “no person in a position of authority should ever abuse that trust.”

“The Training Schools Act was repealed in 1984 and though we cannot change the past, we will continue to do everything we can to ensure that all Ontarians are treated with the compassion, dignity and respect they deserve,” Naqvi said. “Our primary objective with the settlements for abuse victims from training schools is to address the harm suffered while respecting the privacy of these individuals and not re-traumatizing them by publicly revealing their identities.”

In a statement of claim filed in court, Courtice resident Stephen Burley describes one of many attacks he says occurred at Brookside Training School, where he was sent at age 13.

Stephen Burley, 59, sued the provincial government in 2010 alleging a variety of horrific abuse he says he experienced while a student at two Ontario training schools in the early 1970s. Burley wants the government to publicly acknowledge what went on in these institutions.

Burley alleges that a male staffer beat him with a broken wooden broom handle on a number of occasions, and then used that same wooden handle to sodomize him as two other staffers held him down. Burley also alleges he was forced to perform oral sex on the man.

“It was my introduction to hell,” Burley told the Star.

He also says he spent a month in Brookside’s concrete-lined solitary confinement cell, known by staff and students as “the hole.”

“It was cruel and sadistic. I was a child. They broke you apart and you had no chance of putting yourself back together,” said Burley, now 59, who has suffered years of depression, sleepless nights and alcoholism. “You can’t get away from it.”

Health issues have forced him to go on long-term disability from the TTC, where he drove buses for 24 years.

'It was cruel and sadistic. I was a child. They broke you apart and you had no chance of putting yourself back together' Stephen Burley Former student at Brookside Training School

Burley sued the province in 2010 and settled three years later. He was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement that prevents him, on paper, from discussing “the fact and terms” of the settlement. He is speaking out now because he wants the government to publicly acknowledge its responsibility for what happened to him and others.

But in doing so, Burley and others speaking publicly about their settlements are taking a huge risk: That the province will ask for the money back.

Shelly Richardson says she was a rebellious child who had a hard time coping with her parents’ separation when she was 10. She stopped listening to her mom, Rita, and started doing “stupid” things like skipping school and stealing.

It soon became evident that Rita couldn’t provide the kind of structure her daughter needed, so Shelly entered the care of the local children’s aid society and bounced between foster- and group homes.

When she was 13, Shelly and a few friends stole a couple of cars to go joyriding. When she was caught, a judge sent her to Brookside Training School.

Shelly Richardson alleges she was forced to perform sexual acts with three male staff members at Brookside Training School in Cobourg from 1979 to 1981 when she was between the ages of 13 and 15. Richardson, now 51, is seeking a public apology for the alleged abuse she says she, and other students, endured at the provincially run schools.

Students sent to residential training schools took courses that followed the regular Ontario curriculum, such as English, math, science and shop class. In some cases, classrooms and bedrooms were in one building.

In an interview with the Star, Richardson said the abuse at the hands of three male staff members started almost immediately after she walked through the doors of Johnson House, a locked-down facility for girls, in 1979. Her allegations mirror those in a statement of claim filed against the province in 2004. She has since settled.

It began with one of the senior male staff members, who asked her to help him in the basement laundry room as a ruse.

Alone with her, she says this staffer would reach under her shirt and fondle her breasts, rub his groin against her body and force her to touch his penis.

“He just said nobody would believe me if I said anything, so it was better not to say nothing. He said we’re known to be liars and we were in there for that reason,” Richardson said in an interview.

On another occasion, Richardson says she was caught smoking in her room by a different male staffer. She says he threatened to report her unless she submitted to sexual acts with him. Richardson’s court claim alleges he kissed her against her will, fondled her genitals, inserted his fingers into her vagina, and forced her to “fondle his penis until he ejaculated.”

Richardson complied, fearing she would be “sent back” to “Day 1, Stage 1” — a designation that essentially wiped out any progress residents made and reset their time in the institution.

“I just wanted to do my time and get home to my mom,” she said.

One night, Richardson snuck into a fellow resident’s room to smoke a cigarette only to discover her friend being kissed by yet another male staff member. Realizing he’d been caught in the act, the staffer started sexually abusing Richardson, she alleges, telling her that she would not be believed if she told anyone because she was a “bad kid.”

The abuse took other forms. She says both male and female staff would also stand and watch the girls shower. “There was no privacy at all,” she said. “You couldn’t feel comfortable.”

'If anything, training school made me worse. It made me more defensive. I didn’t trust anybody after' Shelly Richardson Former student at Brookside Training School

Richardson says she remembers one male staffer would often sit in the lounge where the girls gathered to watch TV and start massaging her shoulders and back in plain view of the others. Nobody said a word.

By the time she got out at age 15, Richardson says she was a different person — no longer a rebellious, carefree teenager, but a damaged, angry young adult.

“If anything, training school made me worse. It made me more defensive. I didn’t trust anybody after,” she said.

Now 51, Richardson stands in her kitchen, which overlooks a busy street in Cornwall, Ont. The walls and fridge are adorned with photos of her four children from three different relationships.

“What happened in the school made it difficult for me to be in a trusting relationship. I just couldn’t get the bond with somebody,” she said. “I had a hard time when I had kids because I was so protective. To this day, they say I’m too protective.”

The scars aren’t only emotional. She pulls back a shirt sleeve to reveal a scar on her upper right arm where she was stabbed with a butter knife by a fellow female resident in the kitchen of Johnson House. She can still feel a misshapen bone in her nose, which she says was broken when she was kicked in the face by a staff member during a riot at Brookside.

Richardson says she wants a public apology from the Ontario government.

“They were wrong for what they did,” she said. “Did they not do a background check on these people whenever they got hired? Nowadays, you can’t even go on a school trip unless you have a clean background. These people were working with kids.”

Her mother died in 2009 but Richardson never told her about the sexual abuse she suffered in Brookside. “It would have devastated her,” she said.

The first provincially operated training school opened in 1925 in Bowmanville with the enrolment of 16 boys. More than a dozen would be established across the province in the ensuing five decades to eventually provide thousands of children, some as young as 8, with “moral, physical, academic and vocational education” training, according to the 1965 Training School Act.

Section 8 of the act gave family court judges the power to commit children under the age of 16 to training schools even when no crime had been committed. These children were often deemed “unmanageable” or “incorrigible.” The province repealed this section in 1977.

The courts made little distinction when it came to transgressions. Children sent to training school for truancy or running away from home could find themselves in the company of drug dealers and gang members.

“These were not treatment centres, these were basically jails for kids,” said Simona Jellinek, a Toronto lawyer who practises in the area of sexual assault law and who has represented dozens of former training school students.

“The idea was that young people went into these schools in order to learn better behaviour and improve themselves. Instead, the adults in these schools broke the trust of these kids by abusing them,” she said. “As a result, many of my clients went straight from training school pretty much right into adult jail.”

Following the closure of the last training school in 1984, remaining students transitioned into alternative forms of community care, such as group homes or foster homes. Some former students stayed in touch, some drifted apart. A lot had run-ins with the law. Many are dead.

Most suffered in silence.

Of the 11 former training school students who spoke to the Star, only four agreed to their name being used; recounting their experiences publicly was simply too painful, they said.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a large number of former students began to come forward with allegations of abuse, say lawyers involved in the cases. This was prompted, in part, by media reports surrounding settlements and benefits paid out to other victims of abuse at two Ontario training schools operated by a Roman Catholic lay order. Students of other training schools began to wonder if they, too, had cases and started reaching out to lawyers.

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“You’re living in a cesspool for so many years, your mind and body can’t take it any more. You need somebody else to know, to understand. I needed to talk to somebody about it, or I was going to be dead from the stress,” said former training school resident Stephen Burley, who first told his wife after 23 years of marriage about what happened to him. With her support, he reached out to a lawyer.

The allegations contained in the statements of claim viewed by the Star are disturbing and graphic.

One described a ritual known as the “scramble,” which former training school students told the Star entailed staff throwing a sheet over one student and encouraging the others to kick and punch the sheet until it was bloody. Those who didn’t participate would be the next to go under the sheet.

Another punishment would require students to hold a stack of books with their outstretched arms. If the student’s arms fell, they would get beaten.

One former student said he was forced to eat an entire package of cigarettes as punishment for collecting used butts to trade with other boys. He also said he was forced into an empty forty-gallon metal drum, while other residents banged the top and sides of the drum with sticks.

Another alleges that a member of the kitchen staff at Brookside Training School would take students to his home, where he gave the boys marijuana, showed them pornographic films and fondled their genitals.

In one case, a former student said he was ordered to stand with a cigarette in his mouth while a staff member used a bullwhip to snap the cigarette out of his mouth.

Another staff member at Brookside would sneak up on boys while they were watching TV, jump on them, sit on their heads and fart, one claim alleges.

The emotional abuse alleged was just as harmful.

“This included staff members telling children they were no good, no one wanted them, that if they didn’t do what the staff wanted, they would never see their families again,” said Toronto lawyer Loretta Merritt, who has represented dozens of former training school residents, mostly men. “All these kinds of comments, statements and treatment were designed to really break the kids down.”

The shame that can come from suffering abuse, particularly sexual, and the fear of not being believed are what make many victims of training school abuse reluctant to come forward, she said.

“Generally, the perpetrators were expert at getting the children to think the abuse was their fault,” said Merritt. “Maybe they didn’t fight back, maybe they accepted cigarettes or other bribes, maybe they were just afraid and said nothing. But somehow, they formed the belief that it was their fault or that there was something wrong with them.”

There is an added level of complexity, she says, when there was alleged sexual abuse of a boy by a man.

“There’s this whole element of ‘what does that mean with regard to my sexuality?’ ” she said. “Being a victim doesn’t really fit in with the male myth of our society. Men are not supposed to be victims.”

Lawyers who have handled such cases say when former training school students alleging sexual abuse come forward, they often don’t make “good” witnesses in the eyes of the law. Many have criminal records. Many have tried not to remember abuse they suffered.

When former students sue, it’s not usually just about the money, Merritt says, although that financial compensation can be helpful in funding treatment and therapy.

“It’s about being heard, getting acknowledgement, standing up for themselves, seeking some form of justice, healing, and closure,” Merritt said. “The sad thing is, many people have never come forward and they take this to their grave.”

The statements of claim filed in court allege criminal acts by training school staff, yet they are being dealt with in civil court. Lawyers say former students chose the civil route because criminal convictions for sexual abuse are rare. As well, given the time periods covered by the claims — some go back 50 years — many of the alleged perpetrators are now dead.

There have been some criminal investigations into sexual abuse allegations at non-religious training schools, but with little result.

An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police in the mid-1990s surrounding allegations of abuse at White Oaks Training School in Hagersville, Ont., saw more than 300 former students interviewed. The probe resulted in charges against two men who used to work at the school, which closed in 1982.

One of the men, Dwight Wadel, a former housemaster, was acquitted of 15 counts of sex-related charges in relation to five boys who attended the school between 1966 and 1975. In his 2001 ruling, Superior Court Justice Walter Stayshyn characterized the five complainants as “unsavoury” and noted that they all had “significant criminal records and dysfunctional lifestyles.”

Wadel died in 2009.

The Star found only one instance in which a former staff member at a non-religious training school was convicted on abuse charges.

Raymond Arthur Elder, a former house manager at White Oaks, was convicted in 2000 of gross indecency and breach of trust after admitting he had a 14-year-old boy perform oral sex on him in the late 1960s. He was acquitted on nine other sex-related charges in relation to four other students due to a lack of evidence.

During the trial, it was revealed that in 1969, Elder went to Les Horne, an assistant superintendent at the school (later to become Ontario’s first Child Advocate), and confided some of his behaviour.

But Horne didn’t report Elder to the province or police.

“The real tragedy of this case is that nothing was done for (the boy). It was obvious he was a victim and society’s answer . . . was to ship him off somewhere else,” said Superior Court Justice Nick Borkovich during his ruling, according to a report in the Hamilton Spectator.

Elder was given an 18-month conditional sentence, meaning he could avoid jail and return to his home in Nashville, Tenn., where he was a Christian youth worker.

“I’ve got nothing to say. I pleaded guilty to what I was guilty (of). The rest of it was rubbish,” Elder, who is now in his early 70s, told the Star in a brief telephone interview recently. “It’s a long time ago. I’m teaching right now. So do what you feel you need to do.”

Today, the former site of Pine Ridge, which opened in 1925 as the Bowmanville Boys’ Training School, sits derelict. Buildings that housed hundreds of children for half a century are now boarded up, overgrown with weeds and covered in graffiti. No trespassing signs and security cameras warn passersby to keep away.

Remarkably, despite the dilapidated condition of the site, the solitary confinement cell, in which former resident Steven Greenwood spent many tortured hours when he was 15, remains. Standing outside the four-by-eight-foot concrete room, Greenwood recounted a time when he was thrown into “the hole” for 14 days while suffering from poison ivy he contracted after escaping from the school.

“I had blisters on my fingers, my face, everything. They let me have one Epsom salt bath in two weeks. I was in here in the middle of summer. Can you imagine the heat in these places?” said Greenwood, who was sent to Pine Ridge in 1976 after he became a Crown ward.

A self-described drug dealer at 12 who was putting needles in his arms by 13, Greenwood came from an abusive home and resorted to stealing to support himself and his sister, he says.

After just three months at Pine Ridge, Greenwood was sent to another training school, Sprucedale, in Hagersville. His transfer was prompted, he said, after he and a group of other residents, sick of hearing a female staff member abuse students in their beds at night, decided to put a stop to it. They confronted the female staffer, who radioed for help.

“The next thing we know a bunch of guys with baseball bats showed up. We fought back. A couple of guys pulled knives. They beat the s--- out of us,” Greenwood recalled.

He said he spent 11 straight days in the “hole” after that.

Greenwood’s statement of claim alleges that while at the two schools he was subjected to a range of abuse, including being sodomized by two male staffers, being forced to perform oral sex on two male staffers, and having a sexual relationship with a female staff member. He alleges staff used to tell him that he “had no future” and that he was “destined to spend many years in jail.”

“There was no self-worth taught here. If you wanted to survive in here, you better learn to fight,” said Greenwood, now 56. “Every day you looked forward to bed. Once you got your eyes closed, you prayed they stayed closed all night, that nobody bugged you. That was our way of life.”

During another escape, Greenwood says he overdosed on PCP, an anesthetic known on the street as “horse tranquilizer” or “angel dust,” and ended up at Toronto East General Hospital.

Greenwood says two male staffers from Sprucedale came to get him at the hospital in a pickup truck. On the way back to the school, he believes he was raped, but can’t remember details or the identities of the men because he was still recovering from his overdose. When his drug-induced haze cleared four days later, he said, “certain parts of my body were hurt and bleeding that shouldn’t have.”

Greenwood said he wonders what qualifications these men, and other staff, had to deal with kids like him.

In Feb. 1973, the Globe and Mail reported that 86 per cent of the 62 supervisors at Pine Ridge had no professional training, nor were they enrolled in any upgrading courses. At Sprucedale, where Greenwood was sent later, only 30 per cent of supervisors had degrees or certificates. The numbers for the remaining four training schools profiled by the Globe weren’t much better.

“I’m speaking up now because I never had a voice when I was a kid, and nobody wanted to listen,” said Greenwood, a retired electrician, who has suffered years of tortured memories, depression and battles with addictions to hard drugs and alcohol. In 2014, he found Christianity and now wears a silver cross around his neck. Last month, he completed a three-month rehab program.

“I would like a personal apology now,” he said.

Kenyon Wallace can be reached at kwallace@thestar.ca or 416-869-4734