Lou says it was very helpful that his old school apologised for the sexual abuse he suffered there
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Lou says that sometimes he minimises the abuse he experienced as a child.
But recently he has started remembering more about it and realises how ‘messed up’ he was.
Lou grew up in a ‘dysfunctional’ family. His parents were distant and formal, and did not express love or emotion.
He says most of his parenting was done by the family’s domestic staff.
Lou was regularly sexually abused by his older brother. He says that he enjoyed the physical contact, so he did not resist, but later in life this haunted him. The abuse stopped when Lou went to boarding school at the age of eight.
At first, he says, ‘I was a lost little child’, and he found it hard to settle. Gradually he started to enjoy school and make friends. But when he began taking piano lessons on his own, the music teacher sexually abused him, stroking his legs and touching his penis.
Lou says he did not feel frightened by this, and again, he did not mind the physical contact, but later in life he felt very disturbed by it. It would not have occurred to him to say no. ‘You didn’t resist anything that was done to you by an adult’ he says.
He adds that there was a lot of sexual activity between the boys at school, involving touching, kissing and masturbation, and he enjoyed what he saw as affection, and being held. No one supervised the pupils in the dormitories at night.
When Lou moved from prep school to senior school, he experienced sexual abuse by the prefects, who ‘ran the school’. He was also often severely beaten on his bare backside.
He says ‘At the time, I thought it was all perfectly normal behaviour, but looking back, I can see it was appalling’. There was no pastoral care at all.
At one stage, he says, the boys who were involved in the abuse were told by the headteacher to choose between being beaten or expelled.
Lou comments that there was another teacher at the school who regularly offered boys the choice between sitting on his knee or taking a beating.
By the time he left school, Lou says he thought of himself as ‘perverted … damaged goods’. He felt he was to blame for the abuse he had experienced because he enjoyed it.
He started taking drugs, and this continued until he was in his late 30s. He lived on the streets, and was sent to prison for robbery.
Lou says that prison was frightening, but he survived by helping other prisoners with reading and writing.
He did not work for many years, or have any contact with his family. He constantly felt he had no worth and that anyone who knew about his past would reject him.
Having been through recovery and therapy, Lou now understands the abuse was not his fault, and that he couldn’t help sometimes being aroused by it because it was affection he did not get anywhere else.
He wrote to his former prep school and told them about the sexual abuse perpetrated by the music teacher. He received a reply that he says was ‘a good letter. They didn’t dismiss it and they said sorry. This really helped a lot’.
Lou believes that education should focus less on ‘stranger danger’ and more on appropriate sexual behaviour and boundaries. He gives talks in schools about his experiences and he is sure that abuse is still happening behind the doors of very expensive schools.
He thinks that social media has affected teenage behaviour and that conversations about sex need to start at a younger age.
Lou has now been free of drugs for more than 30 years. He trained as a therapist, is married with children and talks openly to them about his past experiences. He feels proud of his children and his relationship with him.