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,”Young was raped repeatedly, tied up and ligatured around the neck,“It was the worst of the worst,I thought I was going to be killed,” he said.

“I was told by Husband that you could easily be found hanged at Medomsley, and that six boys had already hanged themselves that year,” It wasn’t true, but how was Young to know? He stayed silent,Husband, who was married with one child, took Young to his own home, just outside the prison gates,“I was blindfolded and made to lie on the stairs,Then three or four others raped me as well.

I could see them from the bottom of the blindfold.A rope was put around my neck and turned till I passed out.Husband was an expert at it.He was a big, stocky, powerful man.”On 17 June 1977, a day before his 18th birthday, Kevin Young was released and went straight to the nearest police station.

“I explained to the officer that I’d just been released from Medomsley, where I’d been subjected to a constant series of assaults by one of the officers and others I couldn’t identify,” he said,“I showed him the marks on my neck where I’d been ligatured the night before,I was told it was a criminal offence to make such allegations against a prison officer because I was on licence,They were basically threatening to take me back to Medomsley, so I scarpered pretty quick,”When Husband retired from the prison service in 1990 he was awarded the imperial service medal, for long and meritorious service.

In 1994, he was inducted as a minister by the United Reformed church.In 2003, he was convicted of 10 counts of indecent assault and one count of rape against five teenagers at Medomsley, including Young.Husband was initially sentenced to eight years in prison.In 2005, he was charged with four further offences and his sentence extended to 10 years.But he was released in 2009, having served barely half his time.

A year later he died of natural causes.Last week, a special investigation by the prisons and probation ombudsman (PPO) for England and Wales, Adrian Usher, concluded he was “possibly the most prolific sex offender in British history”.Allison and I first wrote about Husband and those he abused in a piece published 13 years ago.The headline was A true horror story: The abuse of teenage boys in a detention centre.But we didn’t know the half of it.

Medomsley was run along military lines, with a “short, sharp, shock” approach to punishment.Detainees were often sent there for trivial offences, and physical and sexual abuse continued for three decades, on an industrial scale.After Husband was convicted, there was some coverage in the media – mainly local papers.But the story was soon forgotten.After all, these boys had been sent to a detention centre.

It was presumed they deserved a short, sharp shock, if not quite as shocking as it turned out.When we wrote about three of Husband’s victims in 2012, it was the first time they had told their stories to a national newspaper.Each one told us they felt dead inside.Our story led to an investigation by Durham police known as Operation Seabrook, which lasted a decade, with 2,077 former inmates alleging abuse by Husband and others at Medomsley.Operation Seabrook led to Usher’s investigation, Operation Deerness, which considered how the abuse was allowed to carry on for so long and what opportunities were missed to stop it.

When the Deerness report was published last week, all the British media covered it.Husband’s face was plastered across TV channels and newspapers.The findings were horrifying.There have now been 2,852 allegations of physical or sexual abuse at Medomsley.Of the 549 sexual abuse allegations, 388 were made against Husband, 33 were made against Husband’s colleague, “store man” Leslie Johnston, which leaves 128 allegations of sexual abuse against people unnamed.

Boys were not only abused at Medomsley, but taken to a local church, an amateur dramatics society and a farm to be raped by multiple people,Two boys died at Medomsley,A number of former inmates, known in detention centres as “trainees”, went to Durham police straight after their release to allege they had been sexually abused,In most cases, they were told not to make a formal complaint unless they wanted to find themselves back at the detention centre,Occasionally, allegations were handed back to Medomsley to investigate, and the institution always, unsurprisingly, cleared itself.

The stories in the report are stomach-churning.Usher, a former police officer with decades of experience, was sickened.“I’ve never seen the level of damage that has been done to these, at the time, young men,” he told me.“Some of them have been unable to form human relationships, even friendships, never mind intimate relationships; have been unable to hold down jobs, have become agoraphobic and had a deep, persistent mistrust of authority and the state.For many young men, a short sentence became a life sentence.

” The prison, the Ministry of Justice, the police and the Home Office are all held accountable in Usher’s report for failing to stop Husband and his fellow abusers,Yet the victims of Medomsley believe this report is a sop, and that it should not have been commissioned,They say that, however good a job the PPO has done, the report could never provide the answers they might get at a public inquiry, where witnesses can be compelled to give evidence under oath,Only with a public inquiry, they say, would they be able to find out the answers to their myriad questions about why the abuse was allowed to continue for three decades,At best, they believe the report is a small step towards justice.

At worst, they believe it is a distraction,Medomsley opened in 1961 and closed in 1987,It could hold up to 130 detainees,Detention centres were tougher institutions than borstals, which were founded on the principle of rehabilitation rather than punishment,Trainees were supposed to be aged 17 to 21, but the PPO’s report acknowledges it held boys as young as 14.

There were 17 allegations of sexual abuse made to Operation Seabrook for the period between 1961 and 1969.Husband began working at Medomsley in 1969, and between that year and 1987 there were 532 allegations.Husband’s reign of abuse could easily have been stopped.Eight years before Young was detained, Husband was arrested at Portland borstal in Dorset, charged with importing pornography.The material included sadomasochistic images of teenage boys.

Husband admitted showing the material to boys in his care, but argued that he was conducting research into homosexuality,The police took no further action,Details of that arrest were written on top of his employment record and followed him throughout his career,But Medomsley nonetheless employed him; he moved there the year of his arrest,In 1989, two years after Medomsley closed, Johnston, a close friend of Husband and a member of the same Freemasons lodge, was charged with sexually assaulting a trainee, Mark Park.

He admitted to the assault and further admitted to gross indecency.He stated these acts included oral sex and mutual masturbation, but denied any acts of buggery.Park said he had been given to Johnston by Husband, but no action was taken against the latter.Johnston pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault.He was fined £250 and received nine months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years.

It was another 14 years until Husband was convicted and 16 years until Johnston was imprisoned.Astonishingly, after Medomsley, Young managed to rebuild his life.He briefly joined the punk group Angelic Upstarts, then ran a number of successful businesses providing security for property.At one point, he told me and Allison, he was worth almost £2m.Then in 1996, 19 years after leaving Medomsley, he bumped into Husband.

Young and his girlfriend were chasing a couple of store robbers in the centre of York, where Young now lived, when he skidded into a man of the church near York Minster.“He was there with his full carry-on, his big hat and all his gear.When I banged him in the chest, it knocked the wind out of him, and as I was falling backwards, his spit was coming down on me.I looked up and there he was.And in that split second I was back 20 years ago, with him on top of me.

” By then, Husband was a minister.We asked Young how he was sure it was him? He said he could tell by the spit.“I could taste him.He spat all over me and humiliated me.He opened my mouth and spat into it time and time again.

”After this, Young had a breakdown.He lost his money, his business, his girlfriend and his home.He started to drink and became addicted to drugs.He moved into a barn in the middle of nowhere, spoke to no one and gave up on life.Two years later, when he was living in a bedsit, the police tracked him down and put a note through his door asking if he would give evidence about the sexual abuse he had experienced at St Camillus