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.READ MORE:Province ignored whistleblowers who warned about child abuse at its training schoolsEach 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 a ...
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