Barnemj -- no I was not a victim, but knew the most recent two on trial well -- although the recent revelations have made me feel a little insecure and paranoid about one drunken night at the Bax Castle Pub shortly after I left -- a night that I don't remember very well due to irresponsible teenage blackout drinking, except some vague images of being at the doors of a teacher's house, then a notion of leaving rapidly, and a clearer memory of drunkenly stumbling along the sunny dawn road towards the train station. But this is so vague and utterly unreliable, and I don't think anything major happened anyway, and I certainly will never name whose house I was at because I have no solid reason to believe they are anything but innocent. It's more that the recent news has made me rethink the events of this one hazy night in a different light, and wonder...
But the recent news has made me very angry, yes. My words in my last post
[Post removed by moderators, as mis-quoting - I hope you understand and appreciate the difficult line we're trying to tread. jtaylor, Moderator] are, as I hope is obvious, angry but humourous bombast, for I certainly do not think that most of the teachers at CH deserve to die! Some of them were great teachers and decent human beings. As the papers mention more and more familiar names (there are now I think 6 or 7 different people who seemingly did far too little, some of whose actions I wonder about criminal negligence...) I start to wonder how many of them were really decent human beings, though.
I was not a victim but I had an awful time at CH for my entire seven years there with only a few exceptions. My Grecians' was relatively tolerable and I was able to come out of my shell a little. For most of the time there I was bullied and socially outcast. I am sure that some of the social conditions than enable child sex abuse by teachers to flourish are the same conditions that led to me having a horrible time there (but nowhere near as bad as some). Most especially the respect for tradition that was endlessly repeated. So many pointless petty rules and hierarchies, so many pointless things done for the sole reason that that was the way they had been done for hundreds of years, without any thought put into the utility or psychological impact on children of these rules. The obsession with how privileged you are to be here discourages and guilts students into silence. And of all the traditions, the most mindless and brutish was "fagging" (not that it was called that at CH as far as I know). Allowing older boys (mainly) to order and push around younger ones in some bizarre travesty of the medieval knight-and-page relation, with the hints of romanticised Greek pederasty, is horrifically barbaric and inegalitarian for a modern society to allow, and a massive vector for bullying, social outcasting, and physical and psychological abuse. Many of these problems are not particular to CH but to English boarding schools in general. At day schools, at least you can escape from the bullying after school.
As for Christianity and Monarchy, they are not really directly relevant except that forcing a thoughtful teenage boy to listen to sermons in Chapel up to three times a week makes him very sympathetic to atheism, but at the time I had no idea to what extent the words issuing from the priest's lecherous mouth were self-serving and so utterly, utterly hollow. And monarchy and remaining feudal institutions of this island are an irrational worm-ridden remnant of a bygone age in a similar way that many of CH's traditions are. Thanks for 20p, weirdly dressed fake Mayor!
I absolutely will condemn Poulton, for everything in the newspapers so far does suggest a very similar pattern to the institutionalized paedophilia in the Catholic Church - excessive self regard for the worthiness and moral stature of oneself and of one's organisation, desperate fixation with preserving reputation, paternalistic and secretive managerial style, tremendous bureaucratic inertia, respect and structural dependence on very dubious medieval traditions, and so on... The quotes from Poulton and Cairncross in the Karim case in, for example
this Argus article are very hard to interpret in any other way than doing far too little, far too late, and with much more serious implications if interpreted ungenerously. It seems clear that their lawyers are telling them to phrase things very carefully. However, since you ask nicely I will hold my words from this point on until the trial is over and I have made a full study of all the available information.
I am actually surprised the media haven't made more of what very much appears to be large scale institutional negligence to me.
I would also like to invoke the memory of Gavin Hutchinson with sadness and anger, and remember a funny, charming and intelligent boy, victim of the herd mentality of social outcasting and institutionalized bullying, who had a worse time than me there, whose life was tragically cut short by a car crash when he was 18. I wasn't his best friend but we were starting to become good friends in the final months of CH and the year or less(?) afterwards. Of course his death wasn't in any way CH's fault, but I am angry that he never had, as far as I can tell, a chance to live a happy teenage life (maybe his home life and friends were OK?) --he was just finally coming out of his shell and showing himself to be a witty, caring, smart young man when he died. If he had been at a school other than CH perhaps he would have had at least a few years of happiness in his life.