I was sexually abused from 11 but mum called me a liar so I was put in asylum where I was drugged & raped by evil doc

SHAKING with fear, Carol Minto lay on the mattress in the ‘treatment room’ at Derby’s Aston Hall, dreading the prick of the needle and the horrific sexual abuse that would follow.

The teenager, then 15, was one of hundreds of children believed to have been drugged, raped and subjected to horrific experimental ‘treatments’ at the psychiatric hospital, between 1954 and 1979.

During her four years at the institution, from 1969, Carol was kept tranquilised, made to wear a strait-jacket, injected with a paralysing ‘truth serum’ and frequently raped by the head physician Dr Kenneth Milner.

Tragically, the terrified teen had been put into the hospital after running away from home to escape vile sexual abuse dished out by older brother, Ian – who used spoons, spatulas and other implements to ‘experiment’ on her.

"I couldn’t believe how cursed I was,” she says. “I’d run away from home to escape my brother’s abuse and run straight into the lion’s den.”

It would be 40 years before Carol, 67, could bring herself to expose the widespread abuse that took place at Aston Hall, prompting a 2018 report which detailed 73 stories of sexual and physical abuse.

Even now Carol – who tells her story in her new book, The Asylum – battles the psychological fallout from her ordeal and has to sleep on a high bed with a view of an open window, in case she needs to escape.

"I still feel as though my brother or Milner could attack me,” she tells The Sun.

“What people don't understand is that it still lives with me to this day.It's still hard to talk about it.”

Assaulted with spoons in sickening experiment

The oldest daughter of a truck driver who was frequently away, and a mother who spent her days and nights at a bingo hall, Carol was left to look after her seven younger siblings, including baby twins.

Carol’s abuse at the hands of her brother began when she was just 11.

One afternoon, when they were alone in the house, Ian dragged her from the landing pinned her down on his bed and pulled off her knickers.

He then began sexually assaulting her with kitchen utensils before forcing her to perform a sex act on him.

It was the first of many attacks that would go on for the next four years.

"It was the same routine every time.He would grab me on the landing and drag me into his bedroom,” she says.

“He used big spoons and spatulas to assault me, like he was doing some sort of experiment on me. It was sickening.

"Ian was much stronger and bigger than me and I couldn't get away from him."

When Carol plucked up the courage to tell her mother what was going on, after the first few assaults, she was in for a shock.

“She said I was a liar and slapped me across the face,” she says. “She told me 'things like that don’t happen in the family'.

“I had no choice but to carry on. The other children were much younger and the twins were only six weeks old.

“There's no way I would have left them in the house because my father worked away all the time and my mother would go out at 10.30 in morning and come back at 11pm at night, seven days a week. She was never a mother to me.”

Branded a 'sexual deviant' for speaking out

After four years Carol began to run away from home and social services got involved.

But when she told the social worker she was being abused by Ian, she was labelled a “fantasist,” and told she would be taken into care if she ran away again.

“That sounded appealing to me,” she says. “I thought 'I’m not stopping here. I’m going'.

“But they weren’t trying to help me. They put down in my medical records that I was a 'dirty sexual deviant'.”

Following another sickening assault, Carol escaped the clutches of her brother by climbing out of a bedroom window, onto the roof of the concrete porch and fleeing into the night.

But her mother and social worker tracked the 15-year-old down to Derby bus station and she was sent to Aston Hall – a psychiatric hospital for children where more than 100 were treated during the 1960s and 70s.

It was to be her home for the next four years.

Injected with paralysing 'truth serum' before rape

On arrival, a nurse took her to a side room with a mattress on the floor, where she was ordered to strip and lie down, before being trussed up in a straight jacket.

Dr Milner then injected her with a drug, which he claimed was ‘truth serum’, before asking her to detail the abuse she had suffered at home.

"You're a naughty girl," he told her with creepy grin, when she'd finished. "You really shouldn't tell such lies."

“That was the first time I was injected with sodium amytal,” she says. “People class it as a date rape drug and it leaves you paralysed from the neck down.

"I could move my head a little bit but I was in cloud cuckoo land.

“He could do what he wanted because he knew I couldn't move or say ‘no’."

He could do what he wanted because he knew I couldn't move or say ‘no’.

Carol was not alone – every morning, before breakfast, one of the girls would be handpicked for the sinister ‘treatment’.

Dr Milner claimed his methods were part of research into ‘narco-analysis’- where drugs are used to unearth traumatic memories.

But the later investigation into the assault claims found he had not documented or recorded the treatment in any way.

As well as using the debilitating sodium amytal, the girls were frequently knocked out so they only knew they had been assaulted by the soreness between their legs when they woke up.

They were also plied with daily doses of the tranquiliser Largactil to keep them compliant and docile.

“We knew the same was happening to all the girls but we didn’t talk about it because it was too embarrassing,” says Carol.

“In the daytime we were so pumped up with Largactil, which made you like a zombie, you couldn't really hold a conversation anyway.”

Dr Milner also carried out unnecessary tests for the sexually transmitted diseases, gonorrhoea.

“I was a girl of 15 and had never been with a boy so I didn’t have gonorrhoea but he did all sorts of tests on me,” she says. “I have the paperwork that shows what he did and he carried out 20 different ‘treatments’ on me – most of which I don't remember.”

Agony as baby girl taken away

Carol was released from the hospital, as soon as she turned 18, but more tragedy was in store for her.

After getting a job in a factory, she fell pregnant but her parents refused to support her.

She gave birth to agirl called Jasmine, in a Derby maternity hospital, but the baby was forcibly taken away and put up for adoption.

“Even then I couldn’t get away from social services,” she says. “I had to look after my daughter for 10 days and on the 10th day they came and took her away from me.

“I missed her so much. It was agony.”

Son helps heal the wounds

At 20, Carol finally found a slice of happiness when she met and married factory worker Sunny Minto, and they had a son, Karl.

When Sunny passed away in 1993, at the age of 56, he made her promise she would always stand up for herself – but it would be another 17 years before she plucked up the courage to tell her story, prompted by her supportive son.

“I don't like talking about it but one day Karl suddenly asked me what sort of childhood I had,” she says.

“Finally, I told him the truth. Then one morning soon after, I woke up and thought 'I’m going to get that b******'. I’m going to get my brother before he dies.’”

After talking to her sisters, she discovered Ian had also abused two of the younger ones and, between them, they reported him to the police.

Ian Mackie was sentenced to five years in prison in 2014, but this was reduced to two and a half years following an appeal, to Carol’s disgust. He died shortly after his release.

During the trial, her appalling treatment at Aston Hall was mentioned and the judge urged her to take it further.

A subsequent investigation saw another 65 victims come forward, and 114 witnesses gave evidence of widespread abuse at the hospital, with some claiming they had been ‘handpicked’ for Dr Milner’s gratification.

Milner died in 1975 and the investigation concluded that, had he been alive today, “Milner would most certainly have been questioned in relation to sexual and physical offences against the children in his care.”

Today the mental scars caused by Carol’s abusers have yet to mend, and she is still on medication to help.

“I will always have some residual mental health issues but I’ve made my peace with that now,” she says.

“I’m the one in charge these days. I like to think I’m a force to be reckoned with.”

The Asylum by Carol Minto is published by Mirror Books at £7.99

WHERE TO GET HELP

Whenever it happened to you, it’s never too late to get support.

If you’ve ever experienced sexual violence or sexual abuse, you can get confidential support from specialists who will listen to you, believe you and understand how hard it is to talk about.

As a victim, you’re entitled to support whether you report the crime or not. Your rights are set out in full in the Victims’ Code. 

Visit gov.uk/sexualabusesupport to see the support on offer.

Source: Read Full Article