There was a quiet cheer among boarding school survivors this week after Charles Spencer spoke about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a head nurse.
“This is an incredibly useful statement because this particular kind of abuse is almost never talked about,” said Jon Bird, director of information and insight at the National Association of People Abused in Childhood.
“Many will have experienced similar abuse at the hands of school principals but will have never spoken about it because it is very difficult for anyone, especially men, to talk about sexual abuse if the perpetrator is a woman,” she added.
Bird said she thought it was unusual for a head nurse to sexually abuse boys: “I think it’s pretty rare compared to the more common abuse of male teachers,” she said. “But it happened, and it was horrifying in its own way,” because the boys were ripped away from their mothers at such a young age, he added.
Sarah, who went to boarding school in the early 1970s, said the head nurse performed intrusive physical examinations on the girls to see if they were menstruating.
Relating to: ‘I don’t think I’m developing emotionally’: Earl Spencer describes the pain of abuse at boarding school
“This woman was very despicable,” he said. “On our first day, my friend’s mother, the head nurse, said that my friend did not like milk. The head nurse was very attractive to the mother, but as soon as she left, the head nurse forced my friend to drink a glass of milk. My friend was sick at the time and the head nurse made it clear to her.
One man recalls “extended bath times by the nurse and much stalling and unnecessary handling of us young boys” while he was at boarding school between the ages of eight and 13 in the mid-1960s.
“There was definitely a sexual aspect to the corporal punishment he inflicted,” he added. “He would turn his rings so that the stones were facing inwards, and then he would hit our bare backs until blood flowed.
“People always say it’s incredibly rare for women to commit sexual harassment, but when I look back I wonder, ‘What would have been going on there if there was no sexuality?’ “I think so,” he said. “It has a profound effect on me: These are formative things in one’s early life, and they shape you.”
Bird, who has worked with residential school survivors for 23 years, said it was very common for matrons to be complicit in the abuse of students by male teachers.
“Matrons must have known and ‘nudged’ male teachers to come to the shower area when the men were there or regularly so close to sexual and physical abuse of children that they did not know what was happening. “It continues,” he said.
Alex Renton, who provides direct support to fellow boarding school survivors through his books, articles and BBC Radio 4 series In Dark Corners, re-examined his database of 1,200 claims from boarding school survivors in the wake of Earl Spencer’s allegations. In the data, it found 11 reports of sexual abuse or extreme physical abuse by matrons and nurses.
But he said references to matrons colluding with pedophile male teachers were much higher.
“These stories are important because British children remain uniquely vulnerable in residential care,” he said. “There is still no clear duty in law to report sexual abuse or suspected sexual abuse of a child – and there are still 170,000 children in Britain living away from their families, in state or private care.”
The government has promised a new law on ‘mandatory reporting’ in the criminal justice bill currently going through parliament. But campaigners say the Home Office’s response to recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has been weak, failed to protect whistleblowers and will leave Britain behind many other countries on child protection.
Paul was at boarding school between 1968 and 1971. He said the sexual abuse perpetrated by his head teacher could not have occurred without the complicity of his head nurse.
“He lived above the principal’s bedroom, where the principal was abusing a lot of little kids,” he said. “There’s no way he didn’t know what was going on. There were many times he pulled us over for harassment and it was so close it was impossible for him not to know.
Terry, who went to boarding school at the age of eight, was told by his mother that the matron would be a mother figure who would be kind to him.
“But on my very first night, it became clear that the head nurse was far from a mother figure when she burst into our dorm room and yelled at us for not folding our socks perfectly. “None of us knew how to fold our socks, so we all got a punishment that first night: a dose of nasty cough medicine,” he said.
“Even for the slightest violation, the punishments continued until they sent us to the vice president. “He was a brutal pedophile and sending us there meant being abused,” she said.
“There was no way the principal didn’t know this: it was a very small school; There were only 90 of us and eight assistant teachers. “He knew what he was sending us into when he chose us to punish us for these minor infractions,” he added. “As an adult thinking about this right now, I wonder if he even asked her to send us to him.”
All instance names have been changed
• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111 and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association of People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support to adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Child Aid hotline at 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Child Helpline on 1800 55 1800; Adult survivors can seek help from the Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at International Child Helplines.