Lucas says ‘Once I started to be open about the abuse I found it much easier to deal with’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Lucas was sexually abused at boarding school while his parents worked abroad.
He says ‘Kids are very vulnerable, especially when their parents are halfway across the world’.
Lucas was sent to a boys’ Catholic boarding school when he was eight years old. His parents were posted overseas.
He said at first it ‘seemed fine’, with lots of other boys whose parents were abroad also there. The school was strict and they had to attend church every day.
But after a while, the housemaster, Mr Jones, started coming into the dormitory and sexually abusing Lucas, by touching him. The first time he went to stay with his parents after this, he told them he didn’t want to go back to school, but he says ‘they thought it was just my emotions’.
The abuse continued regularly for about a year. During this time, the headmaster of the school also sexually abused Lucas, after inviting him to his house.
Lucas’s parents became concerned that he seemed so unhappy. He broke down and told them what had happened. He says his mother was very upset and wanted to return to the UK to prosecute the perpetrators, but his parents were advised not to ‘because of the embarrassment it would cause to the family’. But, Lucas adds, ‘she felt guilty about it for the rest of her life’.
He describes his father as ‘a man’s man’ who had a ‘get on with it and move on’ approach to life, but nonetheless, Lucas’s parents did not send him back to the school.
Lucas says by this time he had changed from ‘a jolly kid’ to being quite unhappy, quiet and withdrawn. He went to a new school near where his parents lived, but says his grades were not very good.
He says that previously he had faith in authority figures, but after the abuse he lost respect for teachers and didn’t want to listen to them.
When he was a young man, Lucas returned to the UK and stood outside the school, wanting to see the teachers who abused him and hurt them. ‘But I just walked away from it’ he says.
He still feels angry about the abuse, and also that when he was a child it would have been very difficult to have prosecuted the abusers. It would have been ‘the word of a 10-year-old child against a teacher … things were very different then’.
For a time Lucas struggled with relationships, but when he got married, he says ‘I became a happy person again’.
Lucas believes that the teachers who abused him took advantage of the fact that his parents were abroad and he was in the UK alone. He believes there should be more rigorous safeguarding of children whose parents are far away.
He had a successful career and is now retired, and says he feels much more relaxed. He has spoken to his wife about his childhood experiences, and has had therapy. He has found talking about the abuse has made it easier to deal with and says he now understands ‘It’s not my fault’.