Survivor of institutional abuse Marie Slark led successful fight for compensation

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

Marie Slark was released from the Huronia Regional Centre in 1970 to live in a foster home managed by the institution. Nine years earlier, as a slight seven-year-old, she had been rejected by her dysfunctional parents and placed by Children's Aid in the sprawling complex built in Central Ontario to house children with intellectual disabilities.
Life at the Huronia Centre was horrific, say survivors who recount endless days of neglect and abuse. Marie thought the foster home offered her a first chance to live in a place of love and care. Instead, she was beaten with a wire and forced to do all the household chores including caring for younger children.
Her foster father abused her physically and sexually, Ms. Slark told a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2019. 'Because I didn't take care of the baby properly, he beat me until I was black and blue. I remember one time, they made me stay in the basement and wouldn't let me go to the bathroom. They were hoping I would wet my pants so I would find out what the baby felt.'
Throughout her time in the foster home, Ms. Slark was in regular contact with Marilyn Dolmage, a Huronia Regional Centre employee who negotiated the placement and was acting as her social worker. But the lonely 16-year-old girl made no mention in those conversations of the abuses she was suffering. It was 30 years before Ms. Slark confided to Ms. Dolmage, who remained a lifelong friend, about the violence she experienced in foster care. She had kept it a secret because, no matter how bad life was with her foster family, it was better than living at the institution.
Marie Slark died of cancer on May 21 at the age of 71. She and her former classmate Patricia Seth were the lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Ontario government, which ran the Huronia Centre for 133 years until it closed in 2009. That suit made clear the emotional, physical, and psychological trauma experienced by residents. It exposed the mistreatment and neglect of thousands of vulnerable children diagnosed with intellectual challenges, and set the template for lawsuits by survivors of other similar institutions across Canada.
'I can't stress enough how important Marie is as a figure within the disability community,' says Kate Rossiter, an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who is the principal investigator on a project called Recounting Huronia which preserves the stories of survivors. 'The work that she and Pat did around the class-action lawsuit was heroic.'
The $2-billion suit, in which Ms. Slark and Ms. Seth were supported by Ms. Dolmage and her husband, Jim Dolmage, was settled out of court in 2013 for $35-million, nearly $12-million of which went to lawyers and the provincial law society. Many survivors received just $2,000 in compensation for their years of suffering.
But Ms. Slark's willingness to tell her story forced a national conversation about the dehumanizing practice of institutionalizing vulnerable disabled children.
'I call her a soldier,' says Barri Cohen, the writer, director, and producer of Unloved: Huronia's Forgotten Children, an emotionally devastating documentary about Ms. Cohen's search for her own brothers who were housed at the institution and died there. 'Marie was invincible in the way she powered through,' she says. 'She got up again. She was determined.'
Ms. Dolmage says she never stopped apologizing to Ms. Slark for placing her in an abusive foster home. 'And she always said, 'but I didn't want you to know, because you would have sent me back [to the Huronia Centre].' For me, that was the impetus for the class action – to realize that being in those buildings was so much worse than being harmed in all those ways in the community was just appalling.'
Marie Slark was born into a large Toronto family on Jan. 31, 1954. Her mother, Irene O'Reilly, had spent seven years of her own childhood in an orphanage. Marie's father, Douglas Slark, was an immigrant from Great Britain who was diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses.
The family lived in a small apartment above a downtown store where the children were kept in darkened rooms. When found by aid workers, they were severely malnourished and at least one child had serious injuries.
At the age of seven, Ms. Slark had never attended school and could not explain what India was when questioned by mental health experts. As a result, they deemed her intellectually disabled and sent her, along with a sister and a brother, to the Huronia Centre. After the class-action suit was settled, her school file was obtained by Dr. Rossiter's research team. It says: 'Because of the difficulties she represents, the parents are not wanting her home. One definitely would not consider sending Marie back to her mother who was very rejecting.'
Ms. Dolmage says it was a common practice for Children's Aid workers to 'dump' children with diagnosed disabilities – both mental and physical – at institutions like the Huronia Centre. Girls like Marie Slark were not offered for adoption, they were simply locked away.
'When children, even very capable children like Marie, went [to Huronia], they were expected to die there,' Ms. Dolmage says. 'The staff took them for walks to the cemetery [on the centre grounds] and said: 'This is where you're going to end up.''
Children confined to the school were housed according to their age, sex, and intellectual capabilities. Those with more severe disabilities were placed in cages and ignored. Some of those who acted out were punished with ice baths. Others were held in straightjackets or forced to push cement blocks up and down hallways for days. When Ms. Slark was disobedient at the age of 11, she was put on strong antipsychotic medication that made her sleep all day.
'It was run like the military,' Ms. Seth says. 'We were hit with the fly swatter. We were hit with a baseball bat. Sometimes, we were dragged by the hair.' When Ms. Slark took more cookies than she was allowed, she was made to clean the floor with a toothbrush.
'When you dehumanize people, when you dehumanize children especially, all bets are off,' Ms. Cohen says. 'You think you can do anything to them because you don't believe they're fully human. … And, with poorly trained staff, it's a recipe for sadism, which is what we call it in the film.'
Ms. Slark took some refuge in textile crafts and learned how to knit using straightened bobby pins. She once knitted a whole sweater, only to have a teacher force her to unravel it. The institution eventually put her to work sewing straightjackets to be used on other children.
'We grew up together in that awful place,' Ms. Seth says. 'I call it jail. Everybody else calls it a school. To me, it wasn't a school. Maybe I should say reform school, but I don't even know if it was that good.'
Although the people who assessed Ms. Slark as a seven-year-old said they doubted she would ever lead an independent life, she completed her high-school equivalency at Georgian College, got her driver's licence, and worked at many jobs over her lifetime – in restaurants, in a bakery factory, in a factory that made cake tins, and at retail stores including Winners.
She was always looking for people who she could call family, Ms. Dolmage says. Perhaps for that reason, Ms. Slark reconnected with her mother when she was an adult and nursed her through the final stages of cancer.
After her mother died, Ms. Slark worked as a live-in domestic for a family in Vancouver and then Oregon without receiving a dollar in wages. 'I said to her so many times, 'you're being abused, get out of there. If you can get to Toronto, you can stay with us, and we'll help you get sorted out,'' Ms. Dolmage says. 'It finally got to the point where it was so bad, she agreed to that.'
When Ms. Slark arrived back in Ontario, she reconnected with Ms. Seth. During a visit to the Dolmages' home, the two women opened up about the abuses they had endured at the institution. Ms. Dolmage knew of other survivors with similar stories, and that is how the class-action came about. Although there was not much in the way of compensation, the terms of the settlement allowed people to tour the nearly empty Huronia Centre and the grounds, where at least 1,379 former inmates are buried.
It was on one of those tours that Ms. Cohen met Ms. Slark who agreed that Ms. Cohen could follow her around with a camera. The two became good friends.
'One of the lessons I've learned from Marie, apart from patience, is the value of not giving up and being determined. But she also taught me that we need to support and walk alongside our activists, because we may find them in the quietest of places,' Ms. Cohen says. 'She was a brilliant knitter. She was a textile artist, and I think that's what saved her. She was extremely inventive that way. Her apartment was filled with balls of beautiful wool. I think wool was her talisman of creativity and safety.'
Ms. Slark and Ms. Seth also bonded with other survivors through the Remember Every Name project, which aims to honour all of those who are buried in the unmarked graves on the Huronia Centre grounds. And Ms. Slark connected with a woman named Antoinette Charlebois, a former resident who was several years older. The two called each other sisters and lived together until Ms. Charlebois died a couple years ago.
The settlement denied Ms. Slark the chance to tell her story in court. But she took part in a speaking tour organized by Dr. Rossiter through which she enlightened audiences across the country about the suffering to which she and thousands of other children were subjected. 'Marie was brave in a way that always felt both tenacious and quite selfless,' Dr. Rossiter says. 'I think it's really important to understand what her work opened, and what kind of legacy she leaves.'
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