Gabriella is concerned that sexual abuse is seen as a ‘rite of passage’ in some boarding schools
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Gabriella was sexually abused by older boys in a boarding school.
She says ‘Boarding school is seen as a privilege and therefore children will not feel able to complain’.
Gabriella was born in the late 1980s. She describes a difficult family life. Her parents’ relationship was volatile, and she thinks they saw children as ‘quite an inconvenience’.
Gabriella was sent to boarding school from a young age, and over the next several years she was sexually abused on numerous occasions by older boys at the school.
Gabriella is of dual heritage, and she says there was a complete lack of diversity in the school. ‘I would do anything to fit in’ she says.
She adds that the school was unregulated and the pupils were often not adequately supervised. She remembers being aware that the teachers drank alcohol on the premises of the school and that they let some of the older boys do this too.
Gabriella shared a dormitory with other girls. She realised immediately that the older boys were able to access the girls’ dormitory without having to use the corridors, which they did regularly.
One night when a group of boys went into the girls’ dormitory, one of the boys, who was about 13, got into bed with Gabriella. She says he ‘touched me in places and put my hand down his pants’. She was aware similar things were happening to other girls.
A teacher, who she says was ‘obviously drunk’, went into the dormitory and switched on the lights. He saw what was happening and was clearly concerned, but the boys ran off and he simply switched off the light and left. Gabriella says in relation to the response by the teachers, ‘That was the first of many instances like this, where they just kind of went “Stop that” and went away’. She adds that she thinks the boys were ‘slightly emboldened’ by that evening. She didn’t understand what was happening but she went along with it. ‘I was the youngest by far … I wanted to fit in.’
When she was about seven years old, the boys began taking her and a couple of other girls back to their dormitory. She relates ‘We’d sort of be allocated to a boy’s bed … do things and then switch round … at that point it was still just hands’.
Once when Gabriella was in bed with an older boy, he ejaculated. She says that both of them were ‘freaked out’ and she thought that she had ‘played the game wrong … it was the first inkling of it being a bit shameful’.
Later, two older pupils in their early teens began taking her out of school. They took her to a nearby public place and took turns to sexually abuse her.
One of them penetrated her. Gabriella was bleeding and in a lot of pain, and she kicked him away. Afterwards, the boy told other children that he had ‘gone all the way’ with Gabriella. When she saw the shocked expression on the face of another girl, she thought ‘Oh, are you not meant to do that?’
Gabriella was also sexually abused by one male teacher, who would regularly throw her over his shoulder, holding her high up on her legs, and sometimes pulling her onto his lap. She says she didn’t think anything of this at the time, but she now knows that the teacher was later found to have perpetrated sexual offences against children.
She says that towards the end of her time at the school she ‘went a bit crazy’. She was asked to leave, and when she moved to a different school, she began to understand what had happened to her.
‘I discovered very quickly when I went there that the things I thought were normal were not normal … I remember having a few conversations about things and going “What the hell has happened?” because nobody had the same experience as me.’
When Gabriella was 14 years old she began seeing a man who was more than twice her age. He raped her, but at the time she saw this as having sex on her terms. She was also ‘date raped’ but says ‘I didn’t really think anything of it because of what had happened to me … I didn’t percieve it as rape until I was in my 20s’.
By the time Gabriella was in her mid teens, she says ‘I had a terrible alcohol problem ... and was massively depressed’. She was prescribed antidepressants and sent to see a psychologist.
Around this time, she told her parents she had been sexually abused at her first school. She says ‘My father thought I should be grateful for being sent to boarding school, and they accused me of lying’.
In her 20s, Gabriella was abusing drugs and she attempted to take her own life.
Gabriella says that boarding schools should be more strictly regulated and that younger children should not be sent away to school. She thinks teachers in private schools should be well trained in safeguarding and understanding abandonment issues that children may have.
Gabriella has had extensive therapy. She now has a partner and a very good job but she still suffers from panic attacks and finds it difficult to sleep at night. Media stories frequently trigger memories of the abuse she suffered.
Gabriella says ‘I am articulate, I am highly educated, I am all of these things but I am also deeply, deeply broken’.