A former pupil at a Dundee girls’ school has told an inquiry she was forced to spend days in a seclusion room as punishment.
The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard evidence from Rizzo, a pseudonym, who was at Balgay Approved School in the 1970s when she was around 12 years old.
Originally from Glasgow, she was sent there by a children’s panel after getting into trouble for stealing.
During her time at the Dundee establishment, Rizzo said she would “run away at every opportunity” to get back home to her dad.
And it was this behaviour, she said, that led staff restraining her and sending her to a seclusion room nicknamed the ‘cooler’.
‘I had to be physically carried’
She said: “On most occasions when I ran away in Dundee I was brought back by the police.
“They would take me through the big front door and into the head teacher’s office.
“[The staff] would hold me down and I had to be physically carried to the cooler.
“There were other staff members involved but it was the cook I remember because she was huge.
“I could not breathe when she was on me. My whole body would ache.”
Rizzo described feeling like she had been “forgotten about” when she was sent to the cooler, adding that no one would speak to her when she was there.
She told the inquiry: “It was outside of the main building and it had no windows.
“It was almost like going into a stables.
“A lot of the time I was taken there because I was running away. I spent days and days in the cooler and I would sometimes pray not to wake up.
‘I suspect they had forgotten I was there’
“The only think I could do was sleep and count the bricks in the room – I had to do something to keep me sane.
“I was brought food but it was just left. No one would speak to me.
“I suspect they had forgotten I was there.”
Balgay became an approved school – a residential institution for young offenders – in 1933 and housed scores of girls at a time.
The inquiry has previously heard from another former pupil who said she was raped by a staff member there when she was teenager.
