Garry finds it very painful that sexual abuse by females on males is often treated as a joke
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Garry was born with a sensory impairment. He attended a secondary school that had a specialised unit that should have met his needs.
Instead, the school leadership failed to protect him when he was sexually, physically and emotionally abused by other pupils in the school.
When Garry joined the school in the 1990s, he felt like ‘the odd one out’ and he did not make any friends. Almost immediately, the other pupils began to bully him, swearing at him and calling him names, and stealing his things. Then the boys began to physically abuse him, giving him a ‘good kicking’.
By his second year, Garry was being sexually abused. He says girls were the most frequent perpetrators of this. They forced his hands down their pants and inside their blouses, and made him touch them. They stripped Garry’s clothes off in front of other children, and several times masturbated him aggressively and smeared semen over his face. They once tried to force a used tampon into his mouth.
Garry’s parents had had honest and factual conversations with him about sex when he was 10 years old. He says ‘For me it wasn’t something to snigger about and I didn’t know how to deal with people who were disgustingly vulgar’.
If Garry tried to stop the girls abusing him, they would turn on him and accuse him of touching them. He once pushed one of them away from him, and was told off by a teacher. ‘After this, I learned to stay still and take what happened’ he says.
Garry says the teachers in the specialist unit knew he was being bullied. They were sympathetic, but they did not address the problem. However, he is clear that he blames the school leadership for the failure to protect him.
He began suffering with depression and having suicidal thoughts. He would make excuses to try and avoid school. Eventually Garry told his parents about the physical abuse and his mother took him to talk to a senior teacher. When she complained about the way her son was being treated, the teacher said to Garry ‘Well you can be very arrogant, you know’.
His mother kept him out of school for a time, until she was threatened with legal action.
Garry still suffers with depression, low self-esteem and anxiety. He had a breakdown and has nightmares and flashbacks. He feels self-disgust and worthlessness, and has a phobia about sex and intimacy that makes him afraid to touch anyone.
He says ‘It is a major source of pain for me that I had the most intimate experience with someone while being spat on’.
Garry knows his disability had already made him different and vulnerable, especially because he was in a mainstream school, and he feels his gender made the abuse more ‘acceptable’ to the teachers and his peers.
He believes that if he had been a girl, teaching staff would have intervened to protect him, and that the pupils who sexually abused him might have recognised their behaviour was unacceptable.
He feels he was failed by the school, which was not well run; staff were not competent in safeguarding, and he says there was a ‘culture of sweeping things under the rug’.
As an adult he consulted a solicitor about taking action against the school and getting an apology. But he was told he had been too successful in his life to win a legal case.
Garry would like to see a change in the attitudes that lead to abuse by females on males being underplayed and even treated as a joke, and viewed as boys being ‘lucky’. ‘I find it difficult that the focus always seems to be on unpleasant men’ he says, adding ‘I want to be clear this is not to negate what women go through’.
He believes more resources and support should be available for male survivors of abuse, and that abuse against people with physical vulnerabilities should be seen as an aggravated offence.
Finally, Garry says that if a victim and survivor has made a success of their life, it should not affect whether they would qualify for an apology or compensation.
Garry has a close and supportive relationship with his partner. She says she is very proud of him and everything he has achieved.