Discovering Institutional Abuse

Abstract

On Monday, 13 February 1989, St John’s radio host Bill Rowe received a call to his morning talk show program, ‘Open Line’.¹ It was from Steve Neary, a colleague of Rowe’s during their years together in politics. On air, Neary said that in a 1979 inquiry, testimony was given of a cover-up in 1975 when the police investigated sexual and physical abuse of residents at Mount Cashel, a school for boys in St John’s, Newfoundland. Interviewed later, Neary said he had no idea that his phone call ‘was going to set up such a chain reaction. In my wildest imagination, I did not think there were such goings-on … at Mount Cashel … I was completely shocked, the same as everybody else in Newfoundland’ (Harris, 1990, p. 262).