An expert panel has found that Ireland should be legally responsible for workhouses run by Catholic nuns that kept thousands of women and teenage girls against their will in unpaid, forced labor, the Religion News website reports today (February 6, 2013).
Yesterday's report -- which analyzed the now defunct Magdalene Laundries -- found state authorities committed about one-quarter of 10,012 women to the workhouses from 1922 to 1996, often in response to school truancy or homelessness.
Ireland stigmatized them as "fallen" women -- in other words, it viewed them as prostitutes -- but most were simply unwed mothers or daughters of them.
The report found that 15 percent lived in the workhouses for more than five years, and police caught and returned women who fled. The women endured 12-hour work days of washing and ironing.
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