Damien doesn’t believe that children can be guaranteed to be kept safe from sexual abuse at boarding schools
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Damien’s experiences of sexual abuse at a boarding school have convinced him that no amount of supervision and regulation would be enough to protect pupils.
‘Children should go home every night’ he says.
Damien was born soon after the end of the Second World War. He describes his father as very autocratic, and says ‘neither of my parents were very loving’.
Although he didn’t want to go to boarding school, he was given no choice.
Damien says it wasn’t too bad at first, but because he didn’t enjoy or excel at team sports, it wasn’t long before most of the other boys shunned him. ‘I started to get upset … I wanted to have friends.’
Two masters lived in the school house where Damien’s dormitory was. One of them, Mr Thomas, befriended him. Damien says ‘I think he realised I wasn’t very happy’.
Mr Thomas, who was in his mid-twenties, invited Damien to watch television in his room. Damien relates ‘Then he started to get over-friendly, and started to touch me’. He adds that he found this very difficult, but his father had taught him to never question an adult.
To try and avoid the abuser, Damien began to fake illnesses. He did this several times until the school sent him for a hospital check-up. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him and when he returned to school he was caned.
Mr Thomas continued sexually abusing Damien, sometimes making the boy masturbate him, which Damien says he ‘found disgusting’. In the meantime, the other boys began to bully him and taunt him for being ‘teacher’s pet’.
On one occasion when Damien was in Mr Thomas’s room, the headmaster knocked on the door, and Mr Thomas covered Damien’s mouth to keep him quiet. He comments that at that time, homosexuality was illegal.
Damien then relates ‘a terrible experience’ that he endured when Mr Thomas took him on an overnight trip. He assumes that the teacher must have asked his parents’ permission to do this. On the journey, they stopped at a house where there were several other men. He remembers eating a meal, and hearing conversation about trips overseas, and what they had done there with boys.
Damien was then taken to a room where a man tried to anally rape him. He says ‘I screamed the house down in front of them … it was very painful’.
Mr Thomas then drove him to their destination, and introduced him to another man. Damien says he had to let this man molest him, but there was no attempt to rape him. Damien thinks Mr Thomas had realised this was going too far.
This abuse was repeated by another man, and Damien now thinks that Mr Thomas was trafficking him round a paedophile ring. The same thing happened during another trip.
Damien recalls that when they got back to school after these journeys, Mr Thomas made him walk up the drive so he wasn’t seen in the teacher’s care.
He didn’t tell anyone about the abuse he suffered. ‘I was terrified and ashamed of what had happened to me’ he says, adding ‘My parents wouldn’t have believed me’.
Damien was 14 when the abuse began, and 16 when it ended. He left the school having failed his exams. ‘It wrecked my education’ he says. His father told him he would have to go back to the school and retake his exams, and this was the first time he ever stood up to him. ‘I shouted that I wouldn’t, so he didn’t make me but never asked me why.’
He was sent to a ‘crammer’ school where he achieved very good results.
Damien found a job that he loved, although his family considered it beneath what they would expect. He also met the woman who became his wife, and they have enjoyed a long and happy marriage.
He says the abuse ‘completely wrecked my childhood and I lived with it on my own for so many years’. He only told his wife the whole story shortly before he came to the Truth Project.
Damien contacted his former school and asked them about Mr Thomas, but he did not mention the abuse. The school has not responded so far.
His experiences have left him convinced that children should not be sent to boarding schools. He says ‘The trouble is, they are a natural magnet for paedophiles. I really wonder … why have kids if you send them to boarding school?’
But, he says, as long as boarding schools do exist, there needs to be more regulation and supervision, especially at night time. He says that having more female staff is not necessarily a solution, because it wouldn’t always be appropriate for them to be supervising adolescent boys, and women can be abusers too.
He has not had therapy or counselling, and thinks that perhaps he would benefit from it. He concludes that his experiences of abuse have ‘scarred me for life, but on the positive side I have a happy life, with a lovely wife, family, home and friends’.