Violence at Ontario's oldest institution for disabled children exposed in Hot Docs film
Photo of 'Unloved' Director Barri Cohen holding images of her half-brothers Alfie and Louis, who died at Huronia Regional Centre.
Warning: This story is about the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children with disabilities.
By Louise Kinross
Unloved: Huronia's Forgotten Children is a film about shocking violence against Ontario children and adults with intellectual disabilities who were institutionalized at the Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia, Ont. It's a story few Canadians know. Toronto filmmaker Barri Cohen learned as an adult that she had two half-brothers, Alfie and Louis, who she never knew existed. They were sent to Huronia as toddlers in the late 1940s and '50s and died there. In trying to piece together their lives, she uncovers the horrors of Ontario's oldest government-run institution for disabled children, which closed in 2009.
In a class-action lawsuit settled with the government in 2013, plaintiffs alleged that toddlers at Huronia spent their days in cage cribs. Children were drugged to keep them compliant. A three kilometre underground walkway was the scene of beatings. Children were thrown down stairs. They had their bones broken. They were burned. They were lowered, upside down, into buckets of cold water. They were bound in restraints, beaten on their feet, and left in isolation. A girl who stole candy was put in a straight jacket and dumped in the basement for two days with no food and water. She broke her collar bone trying to get out of the jacket. Toilets and showers were in open rooms. Staff allegedly abused children as they showered and sexually assaulted them in their beds. Hundreds of involuntary sterilizations were performed on patients, as well as medical experiments. The cemetery at Huronia holds about 2,000 bodies. Some 1,400 lie in unmarked graves. We interviewed filmmaker Barri Cohen.
BLOOM: The film grew out of you learning you had two half-brothers you never knew. Why was disability so unspeakable that parents would keep their children from knowing they even had a sibling?
Barri Cohen: I think the shame had to do with the way in which fear and lack of resources around difference and diversity in general was deeply conditioned in the culture. And the sense that this was a deep moral failing. Professor Madeline Burghardt is the author of an extraordinary book about the construction of disability and the impact of disability on families who had children separated from them and sent away. She explains in the film that the logic was you don't want resources to be drained—the parents are going to be drained and it will deprive the so-called 'normal' child from having the best of those resources.
But I think the culture of difference and shame is a very, very long one. I couldn't get into it in the film, but going back to the Greeks, there's a history of physical and intellectual difference and how that was handled over time in community: Who was embraced and who wasn't and how were they cast out? I know from the book History of Madness that there was what was called the Ship of Fools—people who had mental health and other physical or intellectual disabilities who would be cast off from the community. We have a long tradition and an unfortunate one of non-inclusion.
Then of course there was the eugenics movement, which really got going into the 20th century with a very strong presence in Canada. The idea was there's a hierarchy of perfection in humans and in that hierarchy we need to separate off the ones who are less perfect, because they'll bring the whole sort of human genetics race down and contaminate the community. Certainly my father, who was born in the late 1920s, would have grown up with that. It was a generation of shunning and of running from and separating off those perceived as the 'less than.'
BLOOM: How did Alfie and Louis die?
Barri Cohen: Louis went in at about age two and died at about four in 1957. There was a big flu pandemic in the world that year but that was later in the year, and Louis died earlier on. Huronia was notorious for hepatitis and very poor infection control. There were a lot of deaths at Huronia that year.
Louis had mumps and from the day-to-day recording of how he was cared for, it appears they gave him vitamin C and maybe penicillin, it wasn't great whatever he got. It seemed the mumps had resolved as there was a gap in his records for a few weeks. Suddenly they find him in distress and he had thrombosis—blood clots.
What I didn't say in the film, because it was too distressing, was there were autopsy photos and these blood clots were so obvious on his body. It's hard to imagine how they would miss this. We were left to deduce one of two things: That they saw it, didn't do anything about it, and didn't note it in the chart, or he was literally neglected and they didn't even see it.
It's also possible they might have had what they called "higher-functioning" teens feeding him and helping the nurse care for him and perhaps they didn't notice. But there was a gap of weeks and then he was distressed at 9 a.m. in the morning and gone by 12.
Alfred was at Huronia from 1947 to 1973. When Alfred went to Huronia he didn't have seizures, but in the 1960s in his chart they started tracking epilepsy and how many seizures he had. Both boys when they were very young were prescribed phenobarbital there, even though they didn't have seizures.
The plaintiffs' statement in the class-action lawsuit, which represented survivors from 1945 to 2009, covered the history from 1876 and was deeply and well researched and annotated. They relied on expert affidavits from doctors and neurologists and psychologists who said that seizures were common in the institution because of the environmental stress of that place. So it may have been that Alfred developed seizures after he went there, and they increased as a response to stress. He was non-verbal, so what could he say? He was found dead in his bed at 5 a.m. He had aspirated.
BLOOM: The neglect and abuse at Huronia was so extreme. Why do so few Canadians know about it?
Barri Cohen: Well, who was going to tell them? Nobody listened. Nobody listened to families. Pat Seth, one of the litigants in the film, said 'I would tell my parents, but who would believe me?'
BLOOM: I recall they didn't allow parents to walk through the institution.
Barri Cohen: Absolutely not. There were inspection reports, but they weren't made public. The school seemed to fare better in survivors' memories. There was a school there, but it topped out at Grade 5. No matter your ability, then you were trained. You went to sewing, cooking, doing farm labour and helping to run the institution by caring for the kids and feeding them.
BLOOM: Of course not everyone was allowed to go to school.
Barri Cohen: Not by a long shot.
The institution was very much out of sight and out of mind. At the time, the whole society participated in the 'othering' of people deemed or labelled disabled. It wasn't until the journalist Pierre Berton in 1959 went up there and said 'You've been warned about this place, this is a bad place' that people heard about it. That led to a propaganda film by the Ontario government that said yes, we run this place and we've actually built more like it and yes, it's run down, so give us more money. They didn't question the model of care, they just asked for more money.
BLOOM: Is it true that there are about 2,000 children and adults buried in the cemetery there and about 1,400 are in unmarked graves?
Barri Cohen: These are good estimates. Earlier in the century they were unmarked. In the 1940s and '50s they were marked with a number. In the '60s they have a name, but no full name and no birth and death date, as they didn't want people to know how young some of the children were. In 1971 parents got together and erected their own stone and stopped burying people there. It wasn't until the survivors wanted their own memorial sculpture in 2019 that there was any acknowledgement of the bigger story of neglect and abuse and harm.
BLOOM: Are there similarities between the abuse at Huronia and the abuse at Canada's residential schools?
Barri Cohen: There are some. When you make up your mind that this is a 'lesser than' person that somehow is so radically different that they aren't fully human, somehow then the next step is you can do anything to them. The logic of dehumanization was seen in the history of colonialism, of eugenics and with genocide.
In Indian residential schools there were no rules around punishment. They invented their own rules and they were draconian. The difference, in a broad statement, with institutions like Huronia and others throughout North America and Europe, was that institutions used behaviour techniques like straight jackets and cold baths. It was seen as acceptable to bind people and hit the bottom of their feet and lock them in rooms for days on end.
BLOOM: In your film, Madeline Burghardt notes that the rise of capitalism was a factor in the growth of institutions, and children who couldn't be productive had to be removed from society.
Barri Cohen: One of the things I was struck by was the separation of children at a very young age. There was the belief that they don't feel the same way that you and I do. We don't care about attachment issues, because they don't feel the same way, and we don't care what they feel. It's a custodial model where children were treated like objects and objectified.
BLOOM: What was most challenging about making the film?
Barri Cohen: Not to become numb.
BLOOM: Because of the enormity of it?
Barri Cohen: I think I could feel numb sometimes as a coping mechanism. I undertook to make this film, even if it was just my own family footage that I was collecting, because that's what it was at first, when no one wanted to touch it. There was a lot of ableism around that and fear. Are we going to have to struggle and listen to people who are going to be too challenging to listen to? Is it going to be, forgive this, 'trauma porn' with no redemption? There was a lot of 'no' when it came to funding.
One of the great, positive things that came out of making the film was meeting extraordinary people. I've become quite close to a number of the survivors and they kept me going. I would spend a lot of time with someone like Pat Seth. We became friends and would hang out and go shopping or go for coffee. I had a lot of fun with her and she's a dear friend. And Marie Slark, I help her with her computers and things like that.
I became good friends with Kate Rossiter at Wilfred Laurier whose book changed my mind about a whole bunch of things. All of these relationships kept me going. But the challenge was I had to go numb to pull through it, and I was concerned that that would overwhelm me.
The numbness can interfere with good storytelling. On the one hand you have to have a certain distance to get through it. The emotional part was around my family. Many times in the edit room there were certain sequences that would always make me cry.
BLOOM: Kate Rossiter talked about how these institutions created sadistic behaviour in staff. What were some of the factors?
Barri Cohen: They were isolated places. They ensured the facility was far away from the community. They were run on an industrial model, an austerity model, where the model of care is custodial but not rehabilitative. The other condition is the type of people who were gathered together were socially despised. It was like a modern, 20th century Ship of Fools that was cast off to sea.
Another condition was the relationships between staff and patient bodies. There were daily interactions with patient bodies in feeding and toileting and surveillance in a way that is totalizing and allowed for daily incursions on people's humanities and dignity. People would have their body parts inspected on a daily basis.
Another factor that is somewhat related is they staffed these places after the war in the 1940s with military veterans. They didn't have any real training and were called counsellors. Many of the survivors talked about how their counsellors were war veterans who were hired coming back from the war. They were very militaristic and they didn't have any love or care for the children. Who knows if they had post traumatic stress disorder. A lot of sadism was unleashed on these children.
BLOOM: One of the most deeply disturbing things to me was hearing about how in the settlement, people who were non-speaking received less compensation because they couldn't tell their story. It seemed like a shocking display of ableism and injustice.
Barri Cohen: That's very true. The claims process was vastly disappointing. If you had been there sometime since 1945 and had survived until 2007 you automatically got $2,000. To get more, you had to be able to say 'somebody did something to me.' You had to be able to speak or communicate in an acceptable form for the courts. That was grotesquely ableist and the solution should have been that everybody who had been there should have gotten far more in compensation. The original class action asked for close to $700 million and it was reduced down.
BLOOM: To $35 million. The other thing that came out in the film was that it didn't matter if you were raped one time, or repeatedly over 20 years, you got the same amount.
Barri Cohen: Yes, it was a category claim not a number claim. The degree of abuse mattered but not the number of occasions it happened on. Their humanity wasn't recognized in how they were compensated.
The problem with class actions in Ontario is that the fee structure for lawyers means they're highly motivated to settle, they're not motivated to go to court and get through the process. The balance gets tipped where they're not fighting for justice anymore, but for their fees. The people involved were devalued and forgotten. They didn't fight for how to fairly compensate non-verbal people. The survivors were deprived of going to court. My guess is that if it had gone to court for three to five months, it would have made national news. That coverage would have made a big difference.
BLOOM: Do you hope your film will prompt investigations into other institutions like it across Canada?
Barri Cohen: I hope so. Before it goes to air we're going to take it to a few festivals and then CBC will broadcast it later in the fall and eventually it will be on CBC Gem for several years. There's a website and we're going to cross-promote it with Wilfred Laurier and Remember Every Name. Madeline Burghardt at Western University is planning to do community-based screenings. There is an institution called the Manitoba Development Centre that is just about to close that is a bad facility, if not worse than Huronia, in terms of the degree of deprivations and punishments. They're almost identical. The Winnipeg Free Press has done some stories on it, but it's not hitting the national news. I know Community Living is developing a curriculum for high schools across Canada on Huronia and related institutions.
You can view Unloved online at the Hot Docs International Film Festival this week. Visit Remember Every Name for more information on survivors. Like this interview? Sign up for our monthly BLOOM e-letter. You'll get family stories and expert advice on raising children with disabilities; interviews with activists, clinicians and researchers; and disability news.
