Abuse Law – Institutions – Mount Penang Juvenile Justice Centre, NSW

In 1991, the New South Wales Ombudsman conducted an inquiry into the administration of Mount Penang after receiving a letter from an inmate who described being seriously harassed and assaulted by other detainees (involving threats of gang rape, being hit in the head with a steel bar, being bitten, cut, shoulder-charged, assaulted in his own bed in front of a staff member, burned with a cigarette, taunted homophobically, being nearly drowned, and being bashed so seriously that he ended up in hospital twice). The inquiry resulted in the finding that the department had failed to ensure that the staff acted within the law when dealing with the boys.  

In 1998, another inquiry was conducted which found that staff members had engaged in sexual misconduct with the boys, and that Mount Penang’s management had failed to adequately address the issue and protect the welfare of the boys in their care.  

The boys were made to work all hours of the day and were treated as slave labour. In 2013, a video was uploaded on YouTube that shows former residents describing the labour and harsh conditions at Mount Penang. They described that the boys worked in a row, turning over the soil in a paddock with only shovels, digging one by one. One of the former residents recalled boys collapsing in the hot sun and being left there or moved under a tree, and not receiving any water.  

In 2014, a former resident provided a statement to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in which he described the violent physical and sexual assaults he received from officers at Mount Penang and said that Mount Penang “…was more like a jail than a home, the boys who lived there referred to it as “the Pound.”  

In 2020, Laurie Maher was charged with 13 child sex offences for abuse perpetrated against six former residents between 1977 and 1988. Laurie Maher stood trial in relation to these offences at the end of 2022.  

We are specialist abuse lawyers and can help you receive acknowledgement, meaningful apology and financial resolution from those institutions and systems of power that failed to protect you from harm. If you would like advice in relation to a childhood or adult sexual, physical and/or psychological/emotional abuse claim in any jurisdiction in Australia, please reach out to the author, Emily Wright, at Littles Lawyers today. 

Further Abuse Law information written by our Emily Wright can be found on our website.