Albert says ‘I’ve tried to act as normal as possible. That may have been a mistake’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Albert’s parents, who were very religious, sent him to a religious junior and secondary school because they wanted him to have a stable education.
He describes a terrible culture of violence. Some of the church staff and brothers inflicted physical punishment and abuse on children, including some particularly vulnerable young boys.
Albert began receiving particular attention from two of the religious staff. They would take Albert into empty rooms around the school where they would sexually abuse him. This would happen regularly. Sometimes they would stop if Albert was getting sore.
They threatened Albert, telling him not to tell anyone about it. He says he was ‘frightened to death’ of the violence in the school. He didn’t feel he could disclose the abuse to anyone. He was sure his parents, certainly his father, would not have believed him. When he told his father about physical punishments at the school, it was just ’laughed off as normal for children misbehaving’.
Albert says he has always had a sense that other children were abused in the same way at the school, not only by the two staff members who abused him but possibly by others. He also feels certain that the head and senior teachers must have known about it. He knows that some parents complained about the physical punishment and thinks it likely that others might have complained about sexual abuse.
As a teenager and as a young man, Albert suffered with a medical condition which resulted in medical tests and worry, but no cause was found. This contributed to him being unable to finish his degree course at university. Only after working with a psychologist in the last few years has he begun to realise how the abuse had affected him in many ways: physically, socially and emotionally.
Albert has struggled to tell people about his experiences. He feels it would damage his relationships with others, or distress them, or they would not believe them. To this day, apart from some professionals, he has told no one except close members of his family.
For a while he wondered whether he should contact the church about the abuse and ask what they had done to stop it happening. He recently he sought to do this via a victim support group. He feels the church did not really want to know about it and still feels he would not be believed. There seemed to him that there were too many barriers to pursuing the matter and therefore he did not.
When Albert heard about the Inquiry, he decided to come forward to assist the Chair and Panel with conclusions and recommendations that would help prevent abuse happening to children in the future.
He says ‘If prevention was put at the heart of things and children were put first and we change culture then some of these things won’t go on.’
The police have contacted Albert about what happened, but he agreed that it would be very difficult to obtain evidence after such a long time and that the abusers, as well as other staff and pupils from the school, may now be very elderly or dead.
His says his relationships with his family have improved. He feels better about himself and recognises he was a victim. After such a long period of denial he now feels that he has dealt with it.