Orphans of Duplessis

The orphan of Duplessis is the name given to thousands of children Orphelin S who were wrongfully declared mentally ills by the government of the Quebec and were confined in psychiatric institutions. It is considered that it is the most important case of ill-treatment of children in the Histoire of Canada.

Description

The orphanages and the schools were under the responsibility of the provincial government, but part of the financing of the psychiatric institutions came from the government of Canada. Years 1940 until in the Years 1960, the Prime Minister for Quebec Maurice Duplessis, in co-operation with the Roman Catholic church which managed the orphanages, developed a strategy to obtain federal subsidies for thousands of children, whose majority had become orphan while being abandoned their unmarried mothers. In certain cases, the catholic orphanages were reclassified like institutions of health care; in others, the children were moved towards existing asylums.

In the years which followed, a long time after the closing of these institutions, the children become adult started to denounce the ill treatments and the sexual abuses which they endured with the hands of the priests, the sisters and the catholic administrators. Pointing out the abuses by the Convents of the Madeleine, the orphans of Duplessis affirm that they were reduced to slavery and taxable people to extreme physical abuses for variations of behavior.

In the Years 1990, it remained approximately 3 000 survivors and an important group was formed, launching a campaign to obtain justice. They gave each other the name of Orphelins of Duplessis . In addition to the responsibility for the government and Church, the Collège of the doctors of Quebec is targeted after certain orphans had found copies of their medical files which had been falsified. Classified mentally defective, several of these children were fixed with a variety of tests of drugs and were used in other medical experiments. Slackened only when they had reached the majority, they were without education and badly prepared with the life of adult. The suicide was not rare; tormented by their treatment, the crime and other behaviors dysfonctionnels were widespread among the group.

At the beginning, the government of Quebec refused their requests for justice, but after they had started to attract each other a broad publicity, in March 1999, the government pequist made a symbolic system offer of approximately 1 000 CAD as a compensation for each victim. The offer was rejected, and the government severely criticized by the public. The guard of the citizen, Daniel Jacoby, declared that the government had standardized the abuses pled by the victims in its way of managing the file. Nevertheless, the Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard always refused to hold an investigation and to make all the light into the scandal.

In 2001, the Orphans receive an offer on behalf of the government of Bernard Landry (Parti Québécois) for a compensation fixes 10 000 CAD per anybody, more 1 000 CAD for each year of unjust imprisonment in a psychiatric institution. The offer thus went up to approximately 25 000 CAD per orphan; it however was limited to the 1 100 surviving orphans that the government had declared defective mental, not including a compensation for the victims of sexual abuses or other forms of abuse. Having little choice, the offer was accepted by those to which it applied, while the others did not accept anything. Many people always support that justice was not made and that a criminal infringement remained unpunished.

In 1942, the legislative Assemblée of Quebec adopted a law making it possible the Roman Catholic church to sell the not asserted skin of any orphan at a medical school. This practice of sale of the corpses of orphans perduré until in the Années 1960. In 2004, members of the Orphans of Duplessis asked the government of Quebec to exhume a cemetery with the abandonment in the east of Montreal, where they believed to find the skins of orphans who could have been the objects of medical experiments. According to testimonys of individuals who were at the psychiatric institution Cité of Midsummer's Day of God (today the Hôpital Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine), the orphans were often used as guinea-pigs with the experiments, and several died about it. The group wishes that the government exhume the corpses for ends of autopsies.

External bonds

Orphan of Duplessis, children of asylum , Radio-Canada

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