Laura-Jane describes the sexual abuse she experienced as ‘an exercise of power over someone who had none’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Laura-Jane was sexually abused by a teacher on the pretext of punishing her for a childish game she had played with her friends.
He remained in his job and was accepted by the community after he appeared in court facing allegations of child sexual abuse.
Laura-Jane was sexually abused in the early 1970s by Mr Williams, a senior teacher in her primary school.
The first time it happened was on a school trip. She woke up in her camp bed to find Mr Williams with his hands either on, or inside, her sleeping bag. ‘He told me that I had been in danger of falling off the bed and that he was helping me. I believed him and went back to sleep’ she writes.
Laura-Jane and a group of other 11-year-old children had a ‘passing craze’ of playing a game that involved sexual exploration. Not long after the trip, back at school one day, Mr Williams caught them doing this, but to their surprise he told them it was fine.
However, he then announced that the children had been behaving badly and would be punished. He caned the boys and called the girls, including Laura-Jane, into his office individually.
Laura-Jane relates ‘I do not recall everything that happened during that interview. I do recall that he asked me if I played with myself’. She continues that she misunderstood the question and thought he was asking whether she played solitary games, which she did.
She then understood from his reaction what he really meant, and was very embarrassed. He made her hold a wooden object and asked her lewd questions about what she knew about male genitals. Laura-Jane says ‘He told me that he had to ask this to find out if I was likely to be pregnant’.
Mr Williams then told Laura-Jane that he would have to tell my parents about what she and the other children had done.
Laura-Jane decided to tell her parents about the game first ‘... as much as I was able to, what I thought had happened, although I was bewildered and did not have the language or the concepts’ she says.
Her parents made Laura-Jane feel that she had done something very wrong and seemed to be taking the same view as Mr Williams. She remembers that one of the children was supported by their parents when Mr Williams reported them for playing the game, and she felt envious of this.
She continues ‘I did not understand that I had been abused and therefore, even had there been a person to whom I could have confided, I would not have been able to put the experience into words’.
A few years later, Laura-Jane heard that Mr Williams had been taken to court for sexual abuse of other children at the school. The case was dismissed on a technicality, and Laura-Jane said this caused indignation in the local community. However, she doesn’t recall there being any similar outrage that he stayed in his post at the school, which he did for several years.
Laura-Jane writes that the immediate impact of the abuse ‘was that I felt very dirty, confused and bewildered’. This was made worse by the fact that her parents seemed to agree with Mr Williams that what the children had done was dirty and wrong, and her mother continued to make comments to this effect.
However, when Mr Williams was taken to court, Laura-Jane was able to make a connection between what he had done on the school trip and in his office, and realised that it was his behaviour that was wrong.
She adds ‘I was puzzled about how the community could calmly accept his continued presence in the school and the community … my mother also appeared to accept that nothing could be done to remove him or to protect other children, and didn’t seem unduly worried by this’.
Laura-Jane says she felt angry and bewildered at the reaction from the adult world and she continued feeling this way during her teenage years and early adulthood, especially when she saw Mr Williams in her local area. It made her feel a sense of powerlessness and shame as she guessed that he had enjoyed her discomfort and embarrassment during their conversation, and been titillated by it, and yet he had not been punished for what he had done.
Mr Williams was friends with a minor celebrity, and because of this connection Laura-Jane’s school was sometimes featured in television programmes, which she says ‘made us and Mr Williams seem very cool’.
The celebrity was later convicted of child sexual abuse, which made Laura-Jane wonder if that criminal behaviour was the basis of his friendship with Mr Williams.
When she considers the possible impact of the sexual abuse she experienced, Laura-Jane describes herself as having been bullied and isolated as a child, then ‘wild and promiscuous’ as a young adult, often placing herself in dangerous situations. She has frequently suffered with depression.
She adds ‘However, I cannot say that any of these things were a direct result of what happened with Mr Williams’.
Laura-Jane says she still feels angry with Mr Williams, but more so with the community and other staff at the school who ‘failed to support and comfort me … to challenge the power and prestige that Mr Williams had within that community, or to protect the children under their care’.
Some years later, Laura-Jane’s mother apologised to her about her reaction.
Laura Jane comments that many things have changed in attitudes, practices and safeguards since she was a child, but she is struck by similarities with more recent high-profile cases of child sexual abuse. ‘In each of these I see the same widespread acceptance of the way things are, the same unwillingness to address and challenge the powerful.’
Laura-Jane adds that she believes that because people in authority are no longer automatically guaranteed respect, this will help to protect children better in the future.