Clutching their eight-week-old sister in their arms, three-year-old Frances and six-year-old Loretta Reilly were abandoned by their mother outside the gates of the Poor Sisters of Nazareth Convent in Belfast. It was 1956. As they looked up at the foreboding wooden gate, little did the confused and frightened children know these walls were to imprison them for the next thirteen years. Suffer the Little Children is one girl's story of survival. Frances Reilly suffered horrifically in the charge of the sisters. Living with the daily brutal and bloody beatings, she was treated like a slave, a child worker to be abused, and an orphan to be raped and molested. The convent regime stripped her of everything - an education, her innocence, her childhood - but through the unimaginable cruelty, the burning hope of rescue or escape was never extinguished. Written with great honesty and integrity, Suffer the Little Children is a gripping yet moving story of the loss of innocence and the spirit of survival.

Frances fought a decade-long court case against the Poor Sisters of Nazareth order to bring to account the nuns who so viciously stole her childhood and ruined the lives of so many. She refuses to be a victim. She is a survivor. Book jacket.