A former student of the Anglicans' Elkhorn school in Manitoba reported that he had suffered both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the principal. First he was punished with repeated slaps to the face and shouted insults about the sinfulness of pagan Indians for speaking in his Native language; later he was brutally sodomized by the same man while confined alone in a room. Similar sadomasochistic blends of racism, piety, and sexual abuse came from 'Charlie,' a Dakota student at a Roman Catholic school in Manitoba. To an Indian reporter this man 'talked of the nightime invasions. Of the whispered, "God loves you," while the priest fondled him. Of the stony silence in the boys' dorm while the crime went on in neighbouring bunks.'

       It is also clear that, in addition to being violent predators, some supervising adults systematically victimised a large number of Natives over whom they had authority.

       The nature scope and intensity of the sexual abuse that occurred in residential schools is not known with any precision. One problem is calculating the significance of former students who are either silent about abuse or vociferous in denying that it occurred to them, or, sometimes, even to others in the schools they attended. Reasons for misleading silences can range from simple embarrassment to intense psychological denial of horrific memories. Silences also emanate from the official sources on the schools. The conventional records cannot yield extensive evidence on the subject for obvious reasons, but some specific inquiries have turned up evidence of pervasive abuse at at least some schools. A 1991 report by the Cariboo Tribal Council on the results of its interviews with former students of the Oblates' St Joseph residential school in Williams Lake produced shocking figures whose reliability should not be doubted. In answer to an interviewer's question to a group of 187 people, consisting of former residential and non-residential school students, whether they had experienced sexual abuse as children, 89 answered in the affirmative, 38 in the negative, and 60 refused to answer. Depending upon how the non-respondents are allocated between the 'yes' and 'no' categories, these data represent a reporting rate of from 48 to 70 per cent. Unfortunately, no further breakdown of residential school and non-residential school victims is available. The chief investigators in a less scientific examination of abuse at the Roman Catholic Kuper Island school in British Columbia found that 'more than half of the [seventy] people we interviewed had horrendous stories.'