Boy 'stripped and beaten' at home run by nuns

An 11-year-old boy was stripped by a man and beaten black and blue at a children's home, a hearing has heard.

A witness at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry said the man "battered hell" out of him at Nazareth House in Aberdeen in the 1960s.

He said the nuns who ran the home would have known about the incident but did not check to see how he was.

He told the inquiry the man dragged him into a bathroom after he was caught arguing with another boy.

He said: "I thought my time was up."

The hearing in Edinburgh entered its third day of examining four children's homes which were run by the Catholic congregation the Sisters of Nazareth in Scotland.

All of them are no longer operating.

The witness, now in his 60s, and who cannot be identified, said he was attacked by the man who was a regular visitor to the institution.

The man had taken off the boy's clothes, leaving him naked as he was punched, the inquiry was told.

"I was black and blue all over my body," said the witness, who could not recall how long the episode lasted.

He told senior counsel to the inquiry Colin MacAulay QC he had no idea why he was stripped, adding: "It's not exactly a normal thing to do, is it, to a young boy? It's a bit peculiar."

He agreed he was shouting and screaming during the assault, which left him with bruises "all over my face, my back, my front and my legs".

Pressed on whether the nuns would have been aware of the incident, he replied: "Yes definitely, they were aware but not one nun approached me."

He told how he was unable to sleep that night and assumed he would not be going to school the next morning.

However, he said one nun told him: "Don't think you're getting away with not going to school."

The witness told how the bus driver then referred him to the school headmaster and the police were called.

Officers later took him back to the home at Nazareth House, he told the inquiry, at which point a nun "took me into a wee side room and pulled me up for getting the police involved".

He added: "I told her it was the headmaster who called the police, not me.

"The annoying thing is he was back in the home that night, the next night after he assaulted me," the witness added.

"He was there every night for the next four years that I was there."

The witness earlier told how the man would regularly turn up at the home at night, but he did not know what the purpose of the visits was.

"All the kids were terrified of him," he said.

The witness also told how the nuns at the home were "quite abusive" and had left him with a phobia of nuns ever since.

The inquiry, before Lady Smith, continues.