A 97-year-old nun in Canada is facing multiple charges connected to alleged sexual assaults at a notorious residential school for Indigenous children in the 1960s and 1970s. Police in Ontario say Francoise Seguin was charged with three counts of "gross indecency," an offence that was repealed when laws were updated in 1987, though it is still possible for the charge to be filed in historic cases involving sexual assaults or child sexual abuse, the CBC reports. Seguin, a nun with the Sisters of Charity of Ottawa, worked at St. Anne's Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, northern Ontario, between 1958 and 1968. Her next court date is in December.
Police say they were contacted late last year about alleged offences committed at St Anne's, as well as a day school in Moosonee and a detention facility in Sudbury. Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson Bill Dickson said the charges involve a single victim who was a young male student at the time, the Globe and Mail reports. "We are not aware of any others but cannot speculate," he said. Former students from St. Anne's, which shut down in 1976, have said physical and sexual assaults happened over decades. They said students were forced to eat their own vomit and were punished in a makeshift electric chair. Four other former staff members have been convicted of offences including indecent assault.
Anna Betty Achneepineskum, Deputy Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, praised the victim for coming forward. "When it comes to these types of testimonies, it's very difficult. It takes a lot of courage, because there's been many times where no one believed them," she said. "And also the court system has not been kind to First Nation citizens in this country, in order for them to acquire that sense of justice." She told the CBC that the charges send a message to the Sisters of Charity that they have to "acknowledge their role in terms of the traumas and the role that they played in these Indian residential schools because right now, they've been able to get off scot-free." (More Canada stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
