At a youth detention centre in north-east England, the paedophile Neville Husband raped and assaulted countless boys. Why was his reign of terror allowed to go on – and why hasn’t there been a public inquiry?
When I met Kevin Young in 2012 he was in his early 50s, handsome, charismatic, smart – and utterly broken. The moment he started talking about Medomsley detention centre he was in tears.
Young was born in Newcastle, in 1959. At two, he was taken into care, and his parents were convicted of wilful neglect. At eight, at a school in Devon, he was sexually abused by the gardener. At 14, at St Camillus, a Catholic residential school in Yorkshire, he was sexually assaulted by the headteacher, James Bernard Littlewood. But none of this compared with his experience at Medomsley, a youth detention centre in north-east England.
He was sent there in 1977, aged 17, after being convicted of receiving stolen property – his brother had given him a watch, the first he had ever owned. The police asked if he knew where it had come from. No, he said. Could it possibly have been stolen, they asked. He thought about it. Well, yes, possibly. He was sentenced to three months’ detention.
The morning after he arrived at Medomsley, he was picked out by prison officer and caterer Neville Husband to work in the kitchen. Husband was a skilled predator. First, he checked Young’s files to see if he was likely to be visited by family. Second, he checked to see if he was a “reliable” victim. “A reliable victim is someone who has already been abused to the point where, if they do speak out, who on earth is going to believe them?” Young told me and my late colleague, the former Guardian prison correspondent Eric Allison. “And who on earth is going to believe Kevin Young, the pauper’s son, who has been in and out of care, who’s a knife-wielding thug, a bully?” That is how a number of care home reports described Young, even though he told us he had been a quiet, over-obedient boy. “The truth is, nobody would have believed me.”
