Sex abuse survivor tells inquiry he was kidnapped from Britain as a boy

On Tuesday, he told Britain's inquiry into child sexual abuse that he recently burnt his British passport, in fury at the injustice done to him - and to his parents, who had asked for him to return, but were fobbed off with the lie that he was in a better place.

Mr Delaney, 67, from Melbourne, was born in England to a single mother and lived in an orphanage while his mother saved money for rare visits from London.

But the orphanage signed papers to send him to Australia.

"I was purely and simply kidnapped out of a country, taken from my mother," he told the inquiry. He was one of thousands sent in the post-war period, recruited by Anglican and Catholic institutions such as the Fairbridge Society.

Many were placed in Australian institutions where physical, sexual and psychological abuse were a daily part of life.

At the age of 10, Mr Delaney was placed at the Bindoon Boys Town orphanage in Western Australia, run by the Christian Brothers.

Within days, he seriously considered killing himself - although his first suicide attempt came two years later, when he swung out into a lake intending to drown, but ended up impaled on a tree root.

A man named Brother Doyle was "probably the most vicious man I ever met in my entire life ??? he derived pleasure from hitting children", Mr Delaney said.

It was Doyle who broke the boy's fingers using a thick leather strap with a hacksaw blade sewn in.

Other brothers used the strap and cane regularly, beating children black and blue.

The children were starving, stealing scraps from the orphanage's piggery, or raw eggs form the henhouse to supplement their weevil-rich diet.

Sexual abuse was common, too. One brother lured him to his room with the offer of sweets, then abused him. Mr Delaney avoided the brother from then on, but then another started showing him favours.

"He was just priming me," Mr Delaney said. The man ordered the boy to his room, ordered him to undress and then raped him.

"This just went on and on [for 18 months]," Mr Delaney said, once or twice a month.

"You cannot refuse when you're in that situation. The beatings you got were quite powerful and they hurt you very much. You do what they tell you to do."

Almost every Christian Brother at the orphanage had a "pet", Mr Delaney said.

In an added level of tragedy, by then his mother and stepfather were making inquiries in Britain in an attempt to bring him home.

But his mother was told "little Edward doesn't remember you and he is better off where he is".

Forty years later, when Mr Delaney was finally reunited with his mother, she showed him a photo of him as a baby she had carried in her purse ever since.

She told him she had been heartbroken but felt powerless in the face of the church, and accusations she had deserted her child.

Mr Delaney had travelled to England to meet her on his British passport. He used it again to return to Australia. Back home he cut it up and vowed that he never wanted to be associated with Britain again.

"The problem the British government had - they don't seem to appreciate that children are the most precious thing in the world. They don't seem to understand that.

"We were just objects that could be just pushed away. We were a problem for England, so to get rid of the problem they kidnapped us and sent us to another country."

Though he eventually found a career and a family, Mr Delaney says his experience as a child left him full of anger and loneliness.

"One of the most hurtful things in life is to be lonely," he said. "My wife still thinks I'm lonely."

Mr Delaney said he felt let down by the redress process from the West Australian government, and, though he had felt encouraged by the 2014 royal commission, he felt it, too, failed to address the full range of abuse, the crimes against children and families.

The inquiry also heard video evidence from an anonymous witness in Australia. He said he had been physically and sexually abused at orphanages in Britain. He was sent to Australia in the early 1950s, when he was 14, and he had thought it would be a "real adventure, going to school on horses, getting ostrich eggs and shooting rabbits".

Instead he was put to work on a farm from 4.30am to 8pm, and was fiercely beaten.

Another witness statement read at the inquiry told of a nine-year-old sent to Australia "into the care of child abusers and perverts", which left him an emotional cripple, a "damaged and isolated man who always struggled to form relationships".

He said he had been given "grand promises" about Australia, but found himself in the care of cruel and abusive adults in Hobart and then Western Australia. At the orphanage in WA he was flogged and beaten almost every week, and was in constant terror at night because "you never knew when they'd come for you".

One brother raped him repeatedly over many months, he said. Another smashed him into a wall and broke his nose.

"The life of a child migrant was lonely and terrifying," he said. "We were just sent away and forgotten."

Another child migrant wrote in a statement of similar horrors, of children "flogged black and blue", men who "beat me without mercy" and paid children to kill cats and bring them the tails, and one man who lured him to his room with the promise of sweets, then abused him.

"All my life I felt ashamed," he said. For decades he could not bear to be touched, even by a doctor.

In the 1990s he discovered he had a family in England. He flew there.

"I was too late to see [my mother] before she died," he said. "I will never forgive England for that."