Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 06:33:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: StSeb@flashmail.com
Subject: Saint Sebastians (interlude)

Ripped from the headlines! You wondered what really happened in English
boarding schools, well here it is courtsey of IHT.

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Tom Perry had not seen his school friend for about 35 years when he
called him out of the blue with an urgent question about the boarding
school they attended together: "Just as a matter of interest," he said,
"did you like the place?" .
It was a deliberate provocation. .
"Hell, Tom, the conversation bowls happily along, and then you ask me a
question like that," Perry said his friend protested. But Perry, a
businessman who turned 50 this year, invited him over to continue the
conversation. .
"There's no point in prating about," Perry said he told his friend. "I
must tell you that when I was at Caldicott, I was sexually abused." .
So began a long process of facing up to the past for Perry, his friend
and at least half a dozen other men who say they were molested by
teachers at the Caldicott School, in Buckinghamshire, between 1964 and
1970. But it has been a bumpy and frustrating road. While one of the
teachers pleaded guilty to abuse in 2003, the case against another, the
school's former headmaster, was thrown out of court by a judge who said
the accusations involved events that had happened so long ago that a fair
trial was impossible. .
The judge's apparent lack of sympathy, the former students say, is
consistent with the general attitude of the British establishment, still
largely made up of men of a certain age and class who went to prep
schools like Caldicott. Such men may be sympathetic about accusations of
sexual misconduct in institutions like the Catholic Church, but
acknowledging the abuse that took place at many boarding schools not so
long ago is another matter altogether. .
"Still," Perry said, "taught me a thing or two about life." .
The common view, many former students say, is that if it happened, you
are not expected to whine about it. .
But for many former students, it seems, memories and anger resurface near
middle age, when their own children reach school age. The death of
parents also liberates some abuse victims from the often-crippling notion
that any attack on their old schools would be seen as criticism of the
mothers and fathers who sent them there. .
But in the 1970s Perry said nothing. Caldicott was a place where loyalty
to the school was emphasized above all else, where a culture of secrecy
and shame prevailed and where emotional distress was something to be
quelled, not indulged. .
James Foucar, secretary of the Association of Boarding School Survivors,
said that when he told his own father, back in the 1970s, that a teacher
was making sexual advances to him, the response was, "So what?" .
"My dad's view is why should you make a fuss - it's commonplace and
nobody spoke about it," Foucar said. "He said that one of his teachers
had his hands permanently down my father's shorts, so what was I
complaining about?" .
Many former students say the trouble lies with boarding school in
general, never mind the era. But British boarding schools have changed
drastically in the last 15 years or so. .
In the old days, they were unregulated, and often run as private,
idiosyncratic fiefs. Punishments were meted out for the slimmest of
reasons, often at the whim of sadistic teachers; and, former students and
teachers said, many schools were suffused by an undercurrent of
sexuality. .
A number of former boarding school students, for instance, describe how
when they lined up en masse, naked, for baths or showers - always cold,
according to the practices of the time - certain teachers would always
seem to appear to watch. .
A former student at a school that has closed described rules and behavior
that seem bizarre, even Dickensian. Among other things, he said, the
headmaster used a billiard cue to beat students, then required them to
shake his hand and thank him. .
People his age generally do not want to discuss what happened, or deflect
their discomfort with bluster and black humor, said the former student,
now 47 and a businessman, who spoke on the condition that he not be
identified. .
"The feeling is, 'Well, we're not nutty as a fruitcake, so it couldn't
have done us much harm,'" he said. "But a lot of people of my generation
are quite complicated sexually, and I think it comes from their
experience at prep school." .
Much of the worst excesses of the past have been swept away by new
regulations, starting with the 1989 Children Act, which detailed the
state's responsibility to young people. Corporal punishment in private
schools was outlawed in 1999. Schools now conduct mandatory background
checks on staff members. The number of ChildLine, a crisis hot line, is
posted in school hallways. .
"The whole punishment system has changed beyond recognition," said Adrian
Underwood, director of the Boarding Schools Association in Britain. "Now
it's inside the normal, civilized norms of society." .
Simon Doggart, the current headmaster of Caldicott, said the school was
not what it had once been. "We make children very aware of what their
rights are and who they should talk to if they're unhappy." .
This is little comfort to Tom Perry, who was sent to Caldicott at 8 years
old in 1963 and who says the sexual attentions of its then-headmaster,
Peter Wright, began when he was 12 and lonely, missing the warmth of
family life and craving intimacy and kindness. "My first sexual kiss was
from Peter Wright," he said. "My first sexual experiences were with him."
.
It was not until decades later that Perry, wracked by depression, sought
psychiatric help. He also quickly found a half-dozen other former
students who, like him, had lived with feelings of shame and complicity
all those years. .
Through his lawyer, Andrew Bright, Wright declined to be interviewed. In
2003, on the basis of statements by Perry and four other former students,
Wright was indicted on 13 counts of indecent assaults and three counts of
gross indecency with a child. But last year a judge, Roger Connor, stayed
the case and set Wright, then 73, free. .
"The long delay," Connor said, "has clearly made it significantly more
difficult for the defendant to put forward his defense." .
Although some former teachers have been convicted in similar cases, many
judges seem unsympathetic, even hostile, to the issue. .
In a similar case, a 58-year-old former teacher at the Cothill School in
Oxfordshire was charged recently with abusing boys in the 1970s. But the
judge, Julian Hall, declared that "this is the stalest case I have been
asked to try" and threw it out. "I think the best thing that should
happen to people who behave in this way," Hall told Oxford Crown Court,
speaking of the former teacher, Jeremy Malim, "is that they should get a
very brisk elbow in the ribs at the time or be rejected." .
Most of the goings-on at Caldicott were known but never spoken about, but
a sexual scandal did erupt there in 1973, when a teacher named Martin
Carson was caught sodomizing a 12-year-old boy, Alastair Rolfe. .
The abuse had gone on for a year, and "during that time, virtually
everything happened," Rolfe, now 43, a writer and editor, said in an
interview. .
Spurred by news of the case against Wright, Rolfe and others came
forward, and Carson pleaded guilty to sodomy, indecent assault and
possessing indecent images of children. In 2003, he was sentenced to two
years in prison. He was released after a year. .
In 1973, though, there was a rush to cover everything up. Carson was
dismissed and eventually got a job at another school. At home, Rolfe
said, "it was always referred to as 'an incident,' like someone tripping
over a curbstone." He was sent right back to the school and did not
discuss the subject again for 30 years when, troubled by issues with his
own children, he began seeing a therapist. .
"I don't want to sound self-pitying," he said, "but I'd probably say it
affects all aspects of my life." That is also true of Mark Winter, a
third man who says he was abused at Caldicott by yet another teacher and
who has gone to the police with his accusations. Winter, 54, a
journalist, says he was 11 when the teacher took him into a room and
began more than a year of routine abuse. "I wandered, completely
traumatized, out of the room," Winter said, recalling how he was then
spotted by the school matron, a sort of nurse and housekeeper. "She said,
'I know what you've been doing, you dirty boy.'" .
Some time later, Winter confided in a schoolmate. "I told him I was a
sexual partner" of the teacher, Winter said. "He looked at me and said,
'Who wasn't?'"