Churinga Special Residential School

The Churinga Special Residential School, located in Greensborough, was established by the St John of God Brothers in 1967. It housed 60 Catholic and Protestant boys (aged 7 to 16) and, in later years, some girls. It was an institution for children deemed to have an intellectual or developmental disability. From 1987, Churinga was registered as a Special School and ran a day-program. Churinga closed in 1990.

Churinga was purpose designed and built to provide a range of residential care, training and treatment programs for boys with intellectual disabilities. The Brothers needed to open a new facility after the Cheltenham site of the St John of God Training Centre was sold to retail organisation Myer in 1966.

According to the guide, A piece of the story Churinga provided residential care to boys (aged 7 to 16) with a developmental disability. An article published by the support group Broken Rites makes the point that

The SJOG Brothers said, blatantly … that their institutions were for “sub-normal” or “retarded” boys. But these words were disparaging. Many SJOG inmates, especially wards of state, had behavioural or learning difficulties and were not necessarily born with an intellectual disability, although they certainly became educationally disadvantaged through their incarceration at St John of God (Broken Rites, “This is how a Catholic religious organisation, the St John of God Brothers, ‘looked after’ disadvantaged boys”).

According to an article on the Broken Rites website, there were initially five Brothers working at Churinga. There was capacity to accommodate 60 residents. Catholic and Protestant boys were accepted. A focus on the boy’s family was a key aspect of the program. Some girls were admitted as residents in the latter years of the service. A small day-centre program was also conducted until 1987 when Churinga became a registered Special School.

Speaking at the Victorian Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations in 2013, Brother Graham who worked at Churinga in the 1980s said that it was “quite a specialised facility in that we were dealing with children with quite severe intellectual disabilities but often with challenging behavioural problems that could not find a placement in other special schools”. He said that by the 1980s most of the staff at Churinga were female lay people. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were Brothers working at Churinga in administration or “involved in the cottages but working alongside female staff members … in the earlier days, in the 60s and 70s, again, we
had mainly brothers with a smaller degree of lay staff members”. He said that “the vast bulk of our offending occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s”. Br Graham stated that in the 1980s, most of the residents came from families, but there were about a dozen state wards at Churinga.

Inquiries including the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that several Brothers employed at Churinga and other institutions sexually abused residents.