Ivan feels that support services are not equipped to deal with male victims of child sexual abuse
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Ivan was sent to an institution in the 1970s for ‘maladjusted boys’.
Here, all the children were completely at the mercy of the staff, most of whom were sexual abusers.
Ivan says he was disruptive at home and labelled as ‘maladjusted’. When he was about 12 or 13, he was sent to a boarding school that was supposedly designed to cope with children like him.
There were about 60 boys at the school and 10 members of staff who lived on the premises, the majority of whom Ivan believes were child sexual abusers. He says that the other teachers must have been aware that boys were being abused but they did nothing about it.
Conditions were harsh at the school, with primitive dormitories and meagre rations. The teachers had total control over the lives of the pupils. Sometimes they would invite individual boys to their rooms to watch television, presenting this as a privilege.
But these invitations were almost always a prelude to sexual abuse. The teachers targeted boys who were enthusiastic in their classes. Ivan says they used to take some time to groom and gain the trust of the pupils, before beginning to sexually abuse them. He explains there seemed to be a ‘code’ between the abusers that one member of staff would not target a boy who was being abused by another colleague.
Ivan was sexually abused by a teacher called Ian for the two or three years he spent at the school.
He says that no one from social services or any other external organisations ever visited the school to check on the welfare of the pupils. The boys had no opportunity to tell anyone outside what was going on. He adds that it would have been ‘pointless’ telling any of the teachers about the sexual abuse as even the ones who were not perpetrating it were aware of it, but did nothing.
Since the early 1980s, Ivan has reported the child sexual abuse at the school to the police several times. He says he has now given up, as they did not take any action, or even a statement from him. He feels the police officers seemed ill-equipped to deal with the allegations, particularly regarding males being raped.
Ivan feels that the only reason that action is being against taken child sexual abuse now is because television stars and persons of prominence have been accused. He says no one cared about the ‘poor people’ who experienced child sexual abuse in the past, and this makes him cynical about the action being taken now.
He feels that his life has been ruined as a result of the sexual abuse which he experienced as a child, and wonders where he would be now had he received a normal education. He suffers from PTSD, has low confidence, is self-destructive and has lived with the fear of becoming a paedophile himself. He has also felt suicidal at times.
Ivan has sought therapy, but he feels that rape and sexual abuse support services are sexist in that male victims of rape are treated differently from female victims. All support service staff he spoke to were female.
Ivan wants victims and survivors of child sexual abuse who have PTSD to receive proper support for their condition. He feels that GPs do not know how to address the issues, and ‘just give out antidepressants’, which do not help him.