Nick says ‘I want to contribute my experience to the Truth Project to honour my 12-year-old self’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Nick was groomed, controlled and sexually abused hundreds of times by a teacher at his private school.
Decades later, he is still working to heal himself from the impacts of the abuse.
When Nick was 12, Mr Evans, a teacher, began grooming Nick and his parents. He invited Nick’s parents for dinner, and encouraged them to agree that Nick should have extra lessons with him. ‘He was a family friend … they trusted him absolutely’ says Nick.
Nick describes Mr Evans as ‘charismatic and charming’, but he adds that he was also arrogant and domineering, and had outbursts of furious anger that intimidated both pupils and staff.
The extra lessons were held after school and during the first one, Mr Evans sexually assaulted Nick. The teacher undid Nick’s trousers and rubbed his groin, claiming it was a technique to relax him.
Nick relates ‘I had no idea what was happening ... I thought this was part of the lesson’. He says he was very naive and had not had any sex education or conversations about sex with his parents.
After this, Mr Evans sexually abused Nick nearly every week for five years. The abuse escalated, with the teacher demanding oral sex. When Nick was 14, the abuser anally raped him for the first time.
Throughout the period of abuse, Mr Evans controlled and manipulated Nick with gifts and outings, and effusive praise. He also isolated Nick from his school friends. Nick recalls ‘He told me from the beginning that our “relationship” was “love” and that other people wouldn’t understand so I should keep our meetings secret’.
He adds ‘I developed a real fear of being found out ... at a boys’ school in the 1960s, one of the worst things to be called was “queer”’.
Even when Mr Evans left to teach at another school, he came to see Nick at weekends and he continued writing to him for years after Nick left school.
About 30 years after the abuse ended, Nick reported Mr Evans to the police. This was prompted by him having therapy which led him to realise the enormity of what had happened to him.
Two years later the abuser was convicted and sent to prison. He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register for life. Nick remarks ‘His impact on me was so great that even when I gave evidence against him part of me felt disloyal’.
In the months before the criminal trial, Nick suffered severe stress and physical illness.
He says that until he was in his 40s, he convinced himself that the abuse had not damaged him, but ‘In fact the long-lasting cost to me has been massive … I have suffered deep, lifelong damage which I’ve been trying to heal through weekly psychotherapy for more than 26 years’.
Nick feels that his adolescent development was distorted by the abuse, and this was made worse by having to lie to his parents and friends. He says ‘In many ways I never developed fully as an adult’.
He continues ‘I used to be ashamed by what I let him do to me but gradually realised through therapy that I had no choice’.
Nick realised that he had been getting flashbacks of the abuse several times a day throughout his life, affecting his concentration. Numerous situations created triggers that crippled his ability to focus on his life, relationships and work. He describes being reckless, heavily self-critical, working and drinking too much, and getting furiously and inappropriately angry.
He has had periods of exhaustion and depression when he could barely function, and felt isolated and distressed. His relationships have been affected, and he and his wife divorced. He has also suffered with feelings of shame due to his concerns that in the time it took him to report Mr Evans to the police, the teacher may have abused other children.
Nick is convinced that without therapy, he would probably be in prison, in hospital, or dead.
He says ‘I have a strong sense that my actual character was changed by what he did, that I never became the person I should have been. Therapy has helped me uncover and untwist more of my true self’.
Nick says he now feels that he deserves to take care of himself and feel the love of his few good friends and family. He hopes that sharing his experience with the Truth Project will give him ‘a sense of completion ... a kind of full stop’.