"The monks stole my childhood"

Today's Sunday Times contains an extremely powerful article by the Sunday Times travel editor Steve Bleach, who happens also to have been a pupil of St Benedict's. He has written in reaction to the conviction of Laurence Soper.

The monks stole my childhood
Forty years ago, I was just one of the pupils beaten and molested by a teacher at a top Catholic school. Last week I saw him convicted of a litany of abuse — and I wept

Although the article is behind the Times' paywall, you can access it for free - you can see two articles a week for free if you register.

The article goes beyond Soper's abuses, it describes the terror of the regular beatings there, of the sexual assaults by other monks and teachers. He names a number of other abusive monks and he has accounts from a number of former pupils (none of them complainants at the Soper trial).

Here's an important point from the article

How did it happen? How did an institution nominally dedicated to Christian values end up as a haven for abusers?

On a practical level, that’s simple. The religious life had obvious attractions for men with paedophile leanings.

Many were struggling to control their sexuality and were sincere when taking their vow of chastity. Others, presumably knowingly, sought communities of like-minded men with — in religious schools — large numbers of defenceless children at their mercy.

Those in denial — and I think there were many at St Benedict’s — could get their thrills from beating children and still convince themselves they were doing the Lord’s work.

Take a wider view, though, and the answer is more disturbing. They did it because they were allowed to: by the school, by the church, by society at large.

Later he goes on to describe this in more depth.

I asked St Benedict’s to help me trace teachers from that time. The school declined. Eventually I tracked down a retired lay teacher whom I recall as a strict master but a decent man.

“I’m not going to criticise the school,” he wrote in response to my request for an interview. “The actions of a couple of monks have done enough to damage its reputation without anyone else contributing.”

Damage to the school’s reputation. No mention of damage to the children in his care. I have no reason to think this teacher, who has now asked not to be named, was aware of the abuse while it was going on. But he certainly knows of it now and still his priorities are clear.

For as long as the reputation of the school is given a higher priority than the welfare of the victims abused there, anger towards the abbey and school will persist and people will wonder whether the place has changed all that much.

The school of course now claims to be a different place. Bleach mentions the review conducted by Lord Carlile and then later points out:

And when the Soper verdict came in, that same Lord Carlile who had conducted that review popped up to issue a statement on the school’s behalf. “The tough lessons of the past have been learnt,” he said. Tough lessons: a turn of phrase worthy of the very teachers who so enjoyed caning me and my mates.