Spectator on low-level sexual abuse
There’s a feature in this week’s Spectator (a right-of-centre political magazine) by one Leo McKinstry about the sexual advances he received from various men at his boarding school in Northern Ireland and how it didn’t do him any harm. The article was provoked, of course, by the recent Michael Jackson controversy. McKinstry talks about the unwanted sexual attentions he received from various well-known, presumably dead, people in Northern Ireland:
My own upbringing was rarely free from such tiresome figures, partly, I suppose, because I was a rather quiet child, anxious to please, and was therefore an easier target than a burly rugby player who might be inclined to greet an unwanted advance with a smack to the jaw. The boarding school I attended in the west of Ulster, Portora Roay, could be said to have form in this regard, given that it was the alma mater of Oscar Wilde, a man whose unbridled passion for London’s rent boys almost amounts to a one-man urban regeneration policy. But when I was there in the Seventies, almost all of the pupils were the harshest of Protestant puritans when it came to any sign of homosexuality in the ranks. Several of the staff, though, were quite the reverse and clung to the Wildean spirit.
Having been in a boarding school myself, I can confirm that sexual harrassment is certainly not in the same league as rape, but that does not mean it’s not a serious matter when it happens. This type of activity, like all sexual abuse, usually is carried out by the powerful on the powerless – whether by teachers on pupils or by older pupils on younger. George Monbiot, in an article published by the Guardian in 1998 (Acceptable Cruelty), noted that sexual abuse by boys on boys was widely known of at his own school.
And what McKinistry doesn’t mention is that sexual harrassment is so insidious because of its connection with bullying: it is not resisted by the victims as much as it might be because the victim often fears that, were it to stop, it would be replaced with outright aggression. This is certainly what I noticed at my own boarding school – there were two people, two forms above mine, who made various sexual innuendos at me during my first year, and one of them was close friends with two of the school’s well-known bullies. He was also of the same physical stature as they were.
McKinstry is right in that we have taken our fear of paedophilia too far – we’ve heard, recently, talk of paedophiles hanging around parks to look at children (not difficult – parents, don’t let your daughters cycle when they wear short skirts and nothing underneath!) and of schools refusing to allow their pupils’ performances to be video-taped by parents in case the tapes fall into the hands of such people.
But boys’ boarding schools are full of boys, and some men are unnaturally turned-on by young boys – a fact which has been known of for millenia and, in fact, is mentioned in Islamic literature. It’s also known that corporal punishment is a turn-on for some perverted men, particularly as was practised in some boarding school with the boy required to bend over and/or pull down his trousers. (The notorious judge who sentenced to death Derek Bentley, a mentally retarded young man who was persuaded by a local delinquent to participate in a robbery in south London which led to the death of a policeman, was also known for this perversion; he would bring a spare pair of trousers to court when sentencing a young man to receive the birch, because he knew of the physical effects this would have on him!) We would be horrified if these perverts treated girls in the same way. Young boys need the same protection.
