U.K. police search suspected children's home

Stories of rapes, routine beatings
In the newspaper interview, Hannaford described how the children were held down and forced to submit to sex and to routine beatings and other forms of physical abuse. An orphan who was sent to the home soon after he was born, Hannaford managed to leave at age 12.

The Very Rev. Robert Key, who presides over Jersey’s religious hierarchy as the Dean of Jersey, said the alleged abuses stem from a culture that gave too little thought to the welfare of children.

“Trust was misplaced,” Key said in the aged Church of Gouray, located near the coast below Haut de la Garenne.

“In those years, coming out of the 19th century, we didn’t have the right view of children. Children were almost routinely beaten and so on, you think of Dickens and all of that. And that kind of culture, where children didn’t have the same rights as adults, continued,” he said.

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