Brave Mansfield survivor tells her story after Aston Hall horror

A report by Derbyshire Police earlier this year brought to light the abuse that young patients of a psychiatric hospital suffered from the 1940s to the 1970s run by Dr Kenneth Milner.
The report into the Aston Hall facility, which opened in the 1920s, found children were allegedly given “truth drug” sodium amytal, stripped and abused.
Dr Milner, who previously worked at Broadmoor and Rampton, ran the psychiatric hospital in Derbyshire from 1947 until his death in 1975.
Seeing Dr Milner on TV after the report was published has encouraged one survivor from Mansfield to break her silence about the horrific abuse she suffered.
The survivor, who cannot be identified for legal reasons,  was a resident in Aston Hall for a year when she was a teenager. 
After suffering abuse at the hands of her family, she was placed into a foster home where she was physically and sexually abused.
She was then sent by social services to stay at Aston Hall after running away from her foster home. 
She said: “I ran away from the foster home and was sat by a river when a woman approached me, and asked me what I was doing. I told her I couldn’t go home, so I was taken to a police station, had to undress and was taken to a home. The next thing I knew, I was at that place.”

She said that she was regularly taken to a room and injected with an unknown substance that made her feel “dozy and dopey.”
She said: “I can see that room like it’s yesterday. It had a mattress on the floor, and the Dr would get nasty and tell me to lay down. 
“He’d inject me with something, I’m not sure what it was, and when I came round I’d be woozy. You’d feel like you were floating and your talking would be slurred. It was a horrible feeling, you just had to go and lie down. We were terrified of him, and of what he used to do in that room. The injection would make you all dozy and dopey. You tried to stay away from him but you couldn’t, once he injected you that was it.”
“There’s a lot I can’t remember, I must have been there a year and there was quite a few people of different ages.”
“You had to tread carefully, if you got told off and you had to go and clean the toilets with a toothbrush and the doctor would get really mad.
“My friend said I need to report it and get it over with, get it out of my mind.”
“He’s dead now, and I don’t want to report it to the police, I’m too scared of the repercussions.”
“I can see him not just stood there, shouting at you.”

“We were terrified of him. I think what made it worse was what he used to do in that room. I can’t get away from it, I can see it was supposed to be a bedroom, with a mattress on the floor, nothing else, just a mattress. 
“He used to tell me to lay on the mattress so I did, and I thought, why, what have I done wrong? 
“I tried to get up and fell back down on the mattress, and he said ‘stand back up you stupid cow’ and as I stood up he grabbed my arm and said ‘what goes on in this room stays in this room, get to your dormitory and get some sleep. I was wobbling all over the place and I though what’s he given me, what’s he done to me?
“His hands were where they shouldn’t be and I went to move them away, and he grabbed me and said ‘you do what you’re told to do’.”
She said that others in the hospital at the same time suffered. 
“There was one incident where another patient got him mad, he grabbed her and dragged her up those stairs. We could all hear her screams.
“One night me and my friend went to bed, and we knelt at the side of the bed and we were asking God to help us, to come and take us away from here but it never happened.”

The survivor says she had put the abuse behind her, and tried to live a normal life until she saw Dr Milner on a news report. 
She said: “I had to call my friend when I saw him, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, it can’t be him, and it brought everything flooding back.”
After a year in Aston Hall, Dr Milner came into her dormitory and told her she was “getting a bit old now”, so she left to rent a bedsit with a friend and tried to forget the abuse. After moving all over the country, she decided it was time to stop running, and face her past. 
The abuse the victim suffered led to her attempting suicide four times - and has had such an effect on her that she can’t be alone in the house if the gas or electric men call in.  
She said: “Why do people do it? I don’t understand, if you’ve got a child you want the best for them. These people didn’t see us as children.
“The worst thing is, the people who do it get away with it. I asked myself why he did it, why my foster parents did it? You don’t get an answer when you ask why, and I often wonder if it was my fault.”

If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story:

• The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) provides a national freephone support line for adults who have suffered any type of abuse in childhood. Tel: 0808 801 0331 for free Monday to Thursday between 10am and 9pm and Friday between 10am and 6pm.

• The Survivors Trust is a UK-wide national umbrella agency for 130 specialist organisations for support for the impact of rape, sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse throughout the UK and Ireland. Tel: 0808 801 0818

• Anyone who feels they require medical help should contact their GP.

WHAT THE POLICE REPORT SAID:
The Derbyshire force began their investigation in 2016 after concerns were raised about the hospital, which closed in the 1990s.
Police collated 115 witness statements, recorded 77 crimes - including 33 instances of physical abuse and 40 sexual, and heard from 65 alleged victims.
Since the report has been published, ex-residents of Aston Hall have come forward to tell their stories. 
A separate review by the Derbyshire safeguarding board found Dr Milner had “great power, control and influence” over troubled youngsters.
The police report stated that if Dr Milner was still alive, he would be investigated for offences which would have namely been “rape, indecent assault contrary to the Sexual Offences Act 1956, Child Cruelty and Assault contrary to Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and Offences Against the Person act 1861 respectively”.
In a statement to BBC’s Newsnight, detective police superindendent Kem Mehmet said: “It was important for the police to investigate, despite knowing from the outset that Dr Milner had died many years prior.The investigation has concluded that had Dr Milner been alive today, he would have been interviewed as a suspect under caution.”