LONDON — Boys and girls were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for decades in workhouse-style schools run by Ireland’s Catholic Church, in which a ‘culture of silence’ showed more concern for protecting victimizers than the children in their care, according to a long-awaited report released today in Dublin. For more than half a century, excessive and arbitrary punishment created a climate in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived ‘with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.’ Sexual molestation was ‘endemic,’ committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities, said the report by Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. And through it all, government inspectors failed to stop what was going on, despite attempts by some individuals to bring their abusers to account in an effort to lessen the trauma that many still suffer years later. These are some of the findings of the 2,600-page report unveiled after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women at more than 200 Catholic-run schools during the 1940s through the 1990s, the […]