Muriel says ‘An institution left to police itself is a huge risk’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
As an adult, Muriel transitioned from male to female.
She gives a moving and thoughtful account of her experiences of sexual abuse at boarding school, and the conflict she went through about her gender identity.
Muriel describes an ‘idyllic’ childhood in the 1950s, growing up in a loving family with a beautiful garden.
She adds that her parents had ideas and values usual for people of their middle-class background at that time. As a boy, Muriel says she was ‘girlish’, and coming from an army background, her mother probably felt ‘I needed to toughen up’.
When Muriel was an eight-year-old boy, she was sent to boarding school. At this school, her happy childhood was destroyed by the headteacher, Mr Smith, who was a brutal child abuser.
She says ‘Immediately I started school, there were routine, arbitrary beatings. He would come in many nights a week and make us all kneel at the end of our beds, and lower our pyjamas. He beat us and manipulated us. He touched my genitals and rectum.’
Muriel says that the abuse happened to all the boys, but she was singled out for more. ‘This man would take me to the toilet in the morning and manipulate me … that was what my life was.’
She adds, ‘Imagine going from the idyllic garden childhood I had … I was a sparkling little kid, only trusting people ... it was incomprehensible’.
The abuse continued, and in an attempt to escape it, Muriel started running away from school, hiding in woodland in the cold winter months, before finding her way home to her parents. She relates ‘I told them about beating but not the disgusting stuff’.
Each time, her parents sent their young son back to school. The third time Mr Smith arrived at the house Muriel says she yelled and pleaded not to be sent back with him. She describes how charming the headteacher was with her parents, but ‘when we got back to school, he beat me so savagely it broke my resistance’.
Muriel looks back on this terrible incident in her life and comments ‘I am proud I resisted and caused him trouble’.
From this point, her behaviour at school changed and she began seeking out punishment at school, from teachers and other pupils.
Although she did not realise it at the time, she was also dealing with conflicted feelings about her gender identity. She says ‘I must have seemed such a weird kid’, but she adds that despite the domineering male culture of the school ‘I was not bullied … maybe something about my difference unnerved them’.
The abuse ended when Muriel moved to senior school, where, she says, ‘I did well, and went to a good university’.
She embarked on a successful and rewarding career, married and had children. On the surface it was ‘all well and good’ but life ‘started to unravel … I was having flashbacks … if you keep a lid on things, they will erupt’.
Muriel describes how when watching television ‘sometimes something would trigger, and I would close down’. She describes cowering in a foetal position, regressing to a childlike state and feeling overwhelming anger, which is not in her usual nature.
Muriel had still never spoken about the sexual abuse she suffered, and says she often questioned some of her recollections, until she had a conversation with a man who had been at the same school and been abused by Mr Smith. She says ‘I didn’t say he had done it to me too, but it was validation for me and the memories I had. I guess I was living in trauma’.
She considers what could have helped protect her as an abused child. She believes her gender issues were separate from the abuse: ‘I was girlish before that’, but that it could have made her more of a target for Mr Smith.
Muriel feels passionately that it is vital that parents and schools allow children and young people to have time and space to be themselves, without the pressure of adult expectations.
She would like to see greater awareness of the harm that boarding school can do. ‘I just think there are real risks … I respect people may like it, and it has changed, but still there is pressure for boys to toughen up, and to have power and control over others to be “a real man” that can be deeply damaging’.
External checks by independent outsiders are essential. No staff at school showed any curiosity about her running away as an eight-year-old, and this should have triggered some intervention.
Muriel would like therapy to be more affordable and more easily available.
She is now very happily remarried, loves her work and has excellent relationships with her children. She says the flashbacks still occur, but less frequently.
Muriel concludes ‘I’m in a much happier place … I believe my healing will continue and love will win’.