The disability royal commission has heard of a woman’s experiences in a Sydney boarding house where she says she was drugged, raped, and beaten.

August 29, 2022

A woman with disability was drugged, raped, hit by staff and deprived of food while living in a Sydney boarding house, a royal commission examining homelessness has been told.

Charlotte, 61, was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager and has lived in about a dozen hospitals and state-run institutions in NSW since, including a privately-owned Stanmore boarding house.

“Life at the boarding house was terrible. It was like a prison. We were treated horribly by the staff and the owner,” she said in a statement read to the disability royal commission on Monday.

“I was hit and raped while I was living there … I had no control over my life and no privacy.”

Charlotte, who lived at the home for about 15 years in the 80s and 90s, said the managers and staff would often hit residents.

“One of the girls who worked in the boarding house kitchen was really violent and abusive,” she said.

“Depending on how she felt, (she) would sometimes not give us breakfast or lunch.”

Charlotte, not her real name, said the same woman would also steal her pension, clothes and wages from working at a sheltered workshop.

Residents who complained were given drugs to keep them quiet.

“I was drugged all the time,” she said.

She said she was often forced to clean up other people’s vomit and faeces and a doctor who visited the residents was allegedly defrauding the Medicare system.

“People that lived there would sometimes go to the toilet on the floor and the owner would make me clean it up. If I didn’t clean it up, he would hit me.”

“There shouldn’t be any boarding houses, and if there is … they shouldn’t be privately owned.”

By 1984, Charlotte had had enough and she went to live with one of the staff member’s former partners, who was a psychiatric nurse.

“He used me and I was his slave. I was not at his house for long, but I was there long enough for him to abuse me,” she said.

“I should have been able to trust him.”

After returning to the boarding house, Charlotte found out she was pregnant and was forced to have an abortion and then sterilised.

“Not long after the termination, I overdosed. It was on purpose. I wanted to die,” she said.

The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has turned its focus to the experiences of disabled people who have been homeless or lived in insecure housing in NSW and Victoria.

Another woman with disability, Dawn, 78, told the commission she pays $230 per week from her pension for a room in a Marrickville hostel.

“It was okay in the beginning (but) for some reason they took all the cutlery … (and) plates away, and the saucepans away,” she said.

Unable to cook and made to feel unwelcome by the four men living at the home, Dawn said she ate with the “street people” at Martin Place, who were “good people”

The inquiry, sitting for five days in Parramatta, will examine whether insecure accommodation exposes people with disability to a greater risk of violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation.

“The evidence of people with disability is likely to identify a number of systemic issues including, first, a lack of affordable, suitable and accessible housing for people with disability and an over-reliance on crisis and temporary accommodation,” counsel assisting Kate Eastman said in her opening remarks.

More than 10,000 people with severe or profound disability are estimated to experience homelessness each year.