Barb Sweet has been a reporter at the St. John’s Telegram in Newfoundland for more than 20 years. The Holland College graduate is best known for her award winning series of articles on sexual abuse victims from Mount Cashel Orphanage. The articles focus on how the victims coped with the abuse, and how it still affects them, decades after the Hughes Inquiry ended. There are three articles in the series in total, all published in the Telegram. The first is called “Bitter legacy: How Mount Cashel survivors are living with the aftermath.” Jason Kerr recently sat down with her to talk about researching and writing the stories.
Jason Kerr: How did you become interested in this story?
Barb Sweet: I didn’t grow up in Newfoundland, but I knew a few lawyers who had been involved in different (abuse) cases. I was just curious to pursue where some of the victims had ended up. It had been mentioned to me that a set of twins who were victims were both dead and I was really interested in telling their story. I guess that’s how I got started on it.
JK: How were you able to find all the different voices in your story?
BS: One of the victims, he had mentioned a couple of people. For the twins, one of which had testified at the enquiry, I just kept trying to track down relatives until I finally got his sister to speak about it. The police officer had never given an interview previously. When I first found him he was a little bit prickly about it. I just kept talking to him and trying to explain what I wanted to do. I wrote emails and was able to actually get him to take me as credible, as someone he would sit down and talk to.
JK: How were you able to get people to open up?
BS: I don’t know if it’s something anyone can really explain. Sometimes there’s this natural thing about yourself that will allow certain people to open up to you. In this case the police officer I guess just wasn’t interested (before). It’s a while ago now so I can’t remember exactly what I said to him. Part of the thing was I went and I read the Hughes Inquiry reports, every single word of it. I guess he got the sense that I wasn’t looking to do a surface story, that I actually had read the material and had an understanding of it. I got the impression that he wasn’t one of these people to suffer fools lightly. He hadn’t ever done an interview. In fact, I was told by someone who had covered the inquiry that he would never speak to me. I managed to get him to speak to me just fine. I guess, basically just doing your homework. This was something that boys have been talking about for a long time and the earlier police investigation had been covered up. Some media were implicit in covering up the whole scandal earlier on, like in the ‘70s, so I can’t tell you exactly what I said to him, but whatever it was, it was just something that clicked with him and he decided he was willing to talk to me. I guess, basically, I wasn’t just looking to do a routine, sensationalized look back on it.
JK: What were some of the other challenges you faced in writing and researching this story?
BS: Time is always an issue, especially in daily print media. I think I was working on two other things at the same time. Tracking down people. This one guy I never did find. He was supposedly pushing a cart, collecting recyclables. I went to his boarding house a bunch of times, drove around looking for him. I never was able to find him. In a lot of cases people just want to forget about it. It can be emotional too, because if you sit down with somebody who’s supposedly had success in their life and then they’re breaking down and telling you, “well, it looks like that but this is really how it affected me,” that can be pretty emotional. It can be hard on you to just know the impact, that you put someone through that, although he thanked me after for having listened to him. I guess, the time, getting the time to do it right. Because I didn’t grow up here I didn’t have the first hand knowledge of (the scandal). You’re tracing back through old stuff and digging out old print copies and files. It can be kind of cumbersome because it’s not digitalized. I went to the provincial archives and watched some of the testimony as well, but there’s never enough time. You’ll spend endless amounts of time watching the testimony and tracking down people, but at some point, the reality of journalism is you can’t devote a year to that.
JK: How long did it take you to write and research this series?
BS: I don’t exactly have an accurate timeline. I would say about a month and a half, on and off. I was working on two other things at the time too. But that was on and off. Actually writing it, probably all I had was a week. I would read the reports in my spare time type of thing. It was an intense couple of weeks.
JK: Does anything from this story stick out in your mind?
BS: The story about Johnny and Jerome Williams really stuck by me. The whole time I was writing it I think I had their pictures on my computer desktop. I always have the picture there on my desktop. It’s like they’re urging you to tell their story. The other one was, you hear about all the bad stories, the people who became drug addicts or their lives kind of fizzled because of Mount Cashel. This guy was one of the good success stories, became a professional teacher, he’s married to the same person, he has children, he’s doing well. I went and interviewed him, and listened for what ended up being three, four hours I guess. His wife left us alone to talk. He explained to me that outwardly it looks like he did well, but inside that’s not the case. I think the story that stuck with me and it might sound strange to some people, was about this dog that used to hang around the orphanage when he was a kid, back in the ‘50s. He was telling me about how he was in the band and there was some kind of flub and they were absolutely berated afterwards by the Christian Brother. I can’t remember exactly what the story says, but the dog comes in and tries to comfort him and the brother then whacks the dog with a hockey stick and the dog runs out. That night he feels something licking his hand, and it’s the dog. The dog snuck in. So he takes the dog out because he didn’t want it to be caught inside the orphanage. Anyway, the next morning, he finds out from a couple of the other boys that the brother had ordered them to throw the dog out a window, I think from four stories high, and then they had to make sure it was dead. He found it in the woods. I went to see him late in the afternoon and was late getting home to walk my own dog. I’m walking my dog and I’m just thinking about this poor dog because it was the one thing that kind of gave him unconditional love. It was a comfort to him and the Brother had the dog destroyed. I was walking my own dog and thinking about this and he phoned me. I was feeling bad because I’d put this man through what I felt was emotional anguish, having to tell all this stuff, then he phoned me and thanked me for listening to him and being able to talk to me, so that will always stick with me, and the story of Johnny and Jerome. Johnny was testifying and was quite the character. He used to wear cowboy hats and that kind of stuff. Jerome would never admit that he had been abused and ended up killing himself years later. Those two stories really motivated me while I was writing the series.
JK: It’s been a few years since you wrote this story. What comes to mind as you reflect on it?
BS: Since then I’ve done stories on a minister who, prior to Mount Cashel breaking, had been convicted of abusing a bunch of kids and was able to get support letters from very prominent people when he was being sentenced. You look back and the way in which that type of abuse against children was viewed at the time was horrific, in the sense that people found a way to dismiss it in some cases. I think now, when I reflect back on it, I think when the scandal broke that it erased that kind of excusing of child abusing. But it’s still a story that’s going to be played out for generations, in terms of the people who went on their and the effects on their children and the effects on their children’s children. That just goes on in cycles. I guess when I reflect on it, they never ended it. Sometimes it goes in good ways in that people are trying to acknowledge what happened and make it easier for victims of sexual abuse by clergy and acknowledging the problem exists, but it never ends with convictions or inquiries. It keeps replaying itself in people’s lives, for generations to come.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
