One of the most horrific aspects of Indian Residential Schools — and the one that took the longest to be publicly revealed — is that virtually from their inception they were institutions awash with child predators.
Schools didn’t bother performing even the most rudimentary background checks on potential new employees and they paid such piddling wages they would take almost any willing recruit. Students were kept constantly hungry and were relentlessly cowed into meek obedience through corporal punishment, both of which would be ruthlessly exploited by abusers.
As for why so few abusers have faced punishment for their actions, the sexual predators who ran through the Indian Residential School system benefited from the fact that so many of their victims ended up dead, homeless, incarcerated or addicted to drugs. For those willing to step forward with charges and relive the traumas of the abuse, the almost universal result was years of court action resulting in a sentence amounting to only a few weeks of jail time per victim.
“The Canadian legal system failed to provide justice to Survivors who were abused,” read the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “When, in the late 1980s, that system eventually did begin to respond to the abuse, it did so inadequately and in a way that often re-victimized the Survivors.”
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