Former residents helping ensure stories of abuse at Manitoba Developmental Centre aren’t forgotten

WARNING: This article contains discussion of abuse, including sexual abuse.

Sean Traverse has a set of keys that allow him to access his own apartment. 

He can come and go at his own leisure — something he was forbidden to do when he lived at the Manitoba Developmental Centre for people with intellectual disabilities more than 25 years ago.

That independence is something he strongly values.

“[It’s] very important, because I can get to do the things that I want that I couldn’t do when I was at MDC,” Traverse said.

Keys held by the staff at the only recently closed Portage la Prairie facility signified the power they had over residents, and Traverse says they were used to lock people like him up in solitary confinement.

“They would punish me, like if I was doing something bad. They would put me in seclusion and lock the door, and before they put you in seclusion — I hate to tell you this — but they stripped you naked,” Traverse said.

Now he and other former residents from the controversial provincially run facility are at the forefront of a project that is trying to ensure the suffering of people who lived there won’t be forgotten.

One of Canada’s last large institutional facilities, the centre, which opened in 1890, closed its doors earlier this month, four years after the provincial government said it would shut down. It was highly criticized for living conditions that some disability advocates described as isolating and inhumane.

The number of people living there had shrunk significantly since the 1960s and 1970s, when it had around 1,200 residents. The province stopped accepting new residents in 1996, except for short-term and court-ordered placements.

By the time the closure was announced in 2021, it had 133 residents, the last of whom moved out this month.

In August 2023, a provincial court approved a $17-million class-action settlement, providing compensation for former residents who said they endured physical abuse, sexual assault, starvation and segregation.

Last year, then Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson also apologized in the legislature to former residents of the centre as part of the class-action settlement.

The settlement included $1 million set aside for an endowment fund that would generate money for projects like educational programming on the history of institutionalization, and initiatives that support community inclusion for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

‘A place where our rights were violated’

Madeline Burghardt has joined former residents on the artifact project. A professor at the University of Manitoba’s College of Rehabilitation Studies, with a focus on critical disability studies, she says the goal of the survivors’ group is to create an exhibit, which could potentially be featured at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The group has several artifacts from the centre but nowhere to house them.

Institutionalizing people with intellectual disabilities has not been designated as a human rights violation, but Burghardt says Traverse told her the human rights museum is where the artifacts should be.

“The institution was a place where our rights were violated,” she remembers Traverse telling her. 

“So he was very clear — ‘our rights were violated.’ That’s what the museum is about. So that’s why these artifacts should go there. That’s the home for them.”

After a visit to the centre with former residents, Burghardt passed along keys that were found.

“We talked about, ‘What did keys mean to you?’ And a lot of people spoke about what they mean. You’re locked, basically. That was what the keys meant to the survivors,” she said.

Staff at the facility referred to solitary confinement rooms as “safety rooms,” Burghardt said — a description Traverse strongly disagrees with.

He still struggles to cope with the abuse he suffered, he says.

“I’m still traumatized by it. I keep having these thoughts of what happened to me.”

Staff turned blind eye to abuse, former resident says

Being forced into secluded rooms wasn’t the only form of punishment he was subjected to when he lived at the facility, from 1992 to 1998, said Traverse. He was also restrained by facility staff, he said.

“They would push me down on the floor and then they’d [go] on their knees and hold me down,” said Traverse.

And it wasn’t just facility staff who abused him, he said. Another male resident sexually abused him multiple times, he says, and it happened in an open bedroom with others around.

“I didn’t like it, but he forced me to have sex with him,” Traverse said. “I didn’t want to tell staff, because if I told staff I might be reprimanded and they probably won’t believe me.”

Traverse alleges staff knew about the abuse but turned a blind eye to it.

“They said, ‘go ahead, we won’t say anything,'” a staff member once told his abuser, according to Traverse.

His healing journey has been marred with down moments, but he’s thankful for New Directions, a Winnipeg non-profit organization that helps people with intellectual disabilities — like himself — live independently with supports like day programming.

He no longer has to go to bed at 10 p.m., or wake up 7 a.m., and he can eat whatever food he wants.

News of the centre’s recent closure made him smile, and he expressed optimism for other survivors.

“I felt happy. It felt great,” Traverse said. “I felt relieved, and hopefully everybody that used to live there can do whatever they want — because it’s their life.”

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For anyone who has been sexually exploited or assaulted, there is support available through crisis lines and local support services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database. ​​If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.