IT'S PART OF THE CURRICULUM, ISN'T IT? (via Robert Schwartz):

British Boarding School Walls Hid Abuse (SARAH LYALL, 10/11/04, NY Times)

Tom Perry had not seen his old friend for some 35 years when he called him out of the blue with an urgent question about the boarding school they attended together. "Just as a matter of interest," he asked, "did you like the place?"

It was a deliberate provocation. "Hell, Tom, the conversation bowls happily along, and then you ask me a question like that,'' Mr. Perry said his friend protested. But Mr. Perry, a businessman who turned 50 this year, invited him over to continue the conversation.

"There's no point in prating about," Mr. Perry said he told his friend. "I must tell you that when I was at Caldicott, I was sexually abused.''

So began a long process of facing up to the past for Mr. Perry, his friend and at least half a dozen other men who say they were molested by teachers at the Caldicott School, in Buckinghamshire, between 1964 and 1970. But it has been a bumpy and frustrating road. While one of the teachers pleaded guilty to abuse, the case against another, the school's former headmaster, was thrown out of court by a skeptical judge who said the accusations involved events that had happened so long ago that a fair trial was impossible.

The judge's apparent lack of sympathy, the former students say, is consistent with the general attitude of the British establishment, still disproportionately made up of men of a certain age and class who went to prep schools like Caldicott. Such men may be sympathetic about accusations of sexual misconduct in institutions like the Catholic Church, but acknowledging the abuse that took place at many boarding schools not so long ago is another matter.

The subject is often played for laughs, as it was in the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral," where an obnoxious banker drunkenly recalls being sodomized by an older boy at his former school. "Still," he adds, "taught me a thing or two about life."

The common view, many former students say, is that if it happened, you are not expected to whine about it.

Hid? Outside of Ancient Sparta, are there any human institutions where pederasty has been more openly acknowledged than the British Navy, the Catholic Church & boarding schools?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2004 8:04 PM