When former residents of Burlington’s long-shuttered St. Joseph’s Orphanage saw how a 2018 BuzzFeed News story about past “unrelenting physical and psychological abuse” finally sparked a state investigation, they hoped for what they saw as decades-overdue justice.
“I don’t think people realize how long that stays with people,” one unidentified survivor said in a statement 50 years after leaving the facility, which housed some 13,000 children from its opening in 1854 to its closing in 1974. “I’ve seen a therapist off and on for years, and I’ve found that the ways I automatically react to things is related to some of what I experienced.”
Although the resulting investigation confirmed in 2020 that “abuse did occur … and that many children suffered,” authorities said they couldn’t press any criminal charges because the accusations were too old. To compensate, they launched a rare effort to help former residents seek restorative justice from religious and government leaders.
Four years later, the St. Joseph’s Orphanage Restorative Justice Inquiry has released a final report chronicling participants’ push for responsible parties to acknowledge and apologize for past misconduct, offer personal records and restitution, and adopt measures “to ensure that these harms never happen again.”
The inquiry was both “helpful and healing” and “difficult and painful,” authors of the 176-page document wrote.
Working with social service and legal professionals, former residents met with the state Department for Children and Families, reviewed 200 of its childhood microfilm files and successfully lobbied for a 2021 Vermont law that eliminated past time limits on filing civil lawsuits alleging childhood physical abuse, the report noted.
But the institutions that oversaw the orphanage — the state’s Roman Catholic Diocese and Vermont Catholic Charities — wouldn’t meet with the former residents’ support group, Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage, nor consider requests for childhood records or restitution, the document added.
“We see no need for further inquiry,” the diocese’s temporary head, Msgr. John McDermott, is quoted as saying in the report.
The facilitators, in turn, called the lack of cooperation both “a source of profound disappointment” as well as “a missed opportunity and a damaging decision.”
The inquiry also faced the challenge of its lack of precedent.
“In contrast to the increasing number of reports of institutional abuse,” facilitators wrote, “there are relatively few examples of restorative responses to these harms.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, for its part, initially hindered efforts to gather people before introducing video-conferencing technology that helped.
Ultimately, the inquiry allowed participants to tell their stories through several public projects, the report noted.
Former residents formed a writers’ group and published an anthology of stories through Vermont’s Green Writers Press.
They partnered with Vermont Folklife to record oral histories and create a traveling exhibition.
They contributed to journalist Christine Kenneally’s 2018 BuzzFeed exposé as well as her 2023 book, “Ghosts of the Orphanage.”
They won the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services’ 2021 Survivor/Activist Award.
And they’re working with Burlington’s Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department to raise money for a memorial and healing garden on the former orphanage grounds.
Although the inquiry is complete, the Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage support group is set to continue.
“We are still a very needy group,” one unidentified participant wrote in the report.
Then again, former residents added that the effort helped them change for the better.
“One of our greatest accomplishments is that we are now visible to all of you, and we are now believed as to what was done to us,” they concluded in a statement. “Through this process we have become advocates for the children of yesterday, today and tomorrow; to never let the abuses we endured happen again.”
