[Nicky91]

For eight months in 1971, Barbara O'Hare was a patient at Aston Hall hospital
When Barbara published her autobiography, it made for implausible reading
But it was the real life account of her life under the 'care' of Dr Kenneth Milner

Barbara O'Hare has no pictures of herself as a child, which pains her immensely. 'When you are in children's homes and the like, no-one takes them,' she explains. 'No-one wants pictures of you.' Except in her case, she believes that someone did.

Photos of her as a 12 year old ('a particularly naive 12 year old,' she points out) do exist, but they are not pictures any sane person would want to see.
'They took some when they were doing whatever it was they did to me,' she remembers.

'I remember that vividly. I'd been drugged. The doctor had held the mask with the ether on it over my face, and I was drifting in and out of consciousness, but I remember the camera flashing over and over again. I was on my back at that point.

'The hospital gown had been pulled up around my waist, exposing my private parts. I remember the light burning into my eyes, and not being able to scream or shout.

'Even now I think about those pictures. Who saw them? Are they still out there? When I switch on the news and hear about paedophile rings and images being found, I think 'were those pictures of me among them?'.

Or were the pictures taken just a part of some scientific experiment? Maybe it wasn't sexual abuse in the classic sense. The truth is I just don't know. That's a terrible thing to have to live with.'

When Barbara, a 59-year-old grandmother who lives in Liverpool, published her autobiography last year, it made for difficult – and highly implausible – reading.

Not even Stephen King could create such a grotesque world, one in which young girls are imprisoned in a mental institution, drugged on a daily basis and experimented on, perhaps even raped, by a doctor whose influence goes right to the top of society.

The Dr Mengele figure in her story ties his victims down, injects them against their will and pumps them full of high-dose drugs, including a 'truth serum' used on soldiers during wartime, all the time telling them that he is doing so to correct their 'deviant' behaviour.

Some are sexually abused. All are terrified and stupefied, in equal measure. Electric shock treatment is a permanent threat. There are wild rumours of some children being killed when their 'treatments' go wrong.

When they aren't being drugged and tortured, the children are put to work. 'Toothbrush treatment' involves them being forced to clean skirting boards with toothbrushes.

All this takes place in a NHS-funded hospital, under the direction of an eminent physician who works for the Home Office.

An army of adults – nurses, social workers, even the child's own father – are impotent, unseeing, perhaps complicit in this shocking abuse.

Is the heroine of the story a reliable narrator? How can she be when she herself says she lived during this time in an almost permanent zombie state?

Yet it was not a work of fiction. It was the real life account of Barbara's life under the 'care' of Dr Kenneth Milner, a certified Home Office doctor.

And her account, disbelieved by so many for so long, yesterday gained credence when the long-awaited police report into his behaviour was released. Her account was mirrored by 142 other witness statements, all making similar claims.

'Dr Milner played with our bodies and our minds,' she says. 'This is the validation that we were telling the truth. When you take account of how long he was there for, he abused thousands of people.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...th-Milner.html