In Dark Corners: Ashdown House (BBC Radio 4)

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Anybody else listened to this? Hideous. Very difficult listening. The writer and presenter, Alex Renton, has made a 3-part series for Radio 4 about endemic sexual abuse of boys at elite boarding schools, starting with Ashdown House, a Sussex prep school, now closed. Multiple abusers, many of whom escaped justice by various means, some still alive and potentially still abusing.

Also about the way the class system made it almost impossible for the abused boys to speak out. Huge emphasis on how lucky these very young boys were to have such a privileged education, importance of stiff upper lip etc etc. Parents kept at arms' length and a lot of emotional distance between parents and children anyway, so many things would be too difficult to talk about, and parents weren't attuned to what was normal and what was worrying in their sons' behaviour. Clear from the interviews that a lot of them are still badly affected in middle age.

As someone who has no boarding experience at all personally or in my family, I am baffled by why parents would send such young children away. I can understand it with teenagers, but 6 and 7yos? Poor little mites.

Forgot the link. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017cqm

PS Boris Johnson's old school.

There are a huge variety of reasons why parents send young children to boarding school, although it's less common now. Many young children were sent because parents lived abroad and it meant that their education would not be interrupted several times over - Army parents for instance. Others because it was the "done thing" for them.

Yes, I'm aware of that. The great majority of very young children who were sent to boarding prep schools did not, however, have families outside the UK. I remember Stephen Fry saying in a documentary about his early years that he knew from when he was very young that he would be sent to board at a prep school when he was 7 or 8, and so would all the other little boys he knew. It was the done thing. He would have been upset to be treated differently because he would have felt he'd lost out. I'm sure there was a lot of that going on.

I'm very much hoping this is extremely rare now. It's a great pity the social change that's made it possible for the upper and upper middle classes to keep their children at home without loss of face didn't come earlier.

Reviving this as I listened to the second and third parts last week. Very grim listening indeed. The one thing it strikes me hasn't changed much unfortunately is that when a child is abused even now other children are not always clear about whose fault this is - i.e. the abuser's, 100%, not the victim's. Several of the people interviewed who were abused at school had experienced the additional trauma of being blamed and ostracised for what had happened to them by other pupils. Still happening now. Exposure to violent porn on the internet can't be helping with a proper understanding of what's abuse and what's consent.

A chilling footnote to this. Nicky Campbell's wife heard this series and told him about it. It's prompted him to go public with his own experiences at Edinburgh Academy. Were there any schools in the 1970s where children's welfare was put above the school's reputation?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62308621

I listened, horrific.
It strikes me that every single place that children have been left vulnerable without parental protection they are attacked. Girls in care in Rotterham, boys entering the priesthood, boarding schools, everywhere.

I have just started listening to it too. Heroic of the journalist. Awful listening.

In the early noughties I had a manager who sent his seven year old son to boarding school, and he lamented to us that the child was finding it hard and ‘crying a lot’. He couldn’t understand it - his daughter had taken to it like a duck to water, apparently. What I couldn’t understand was why he did it.

He justified it by saying he’d be going on a foreign posting with work in a couple of years, and so it was for his son to get used to it while they weren’t so far away. But there’s a huge difference between 7 and 9; 9 is bad enough but 7! His wife didn’t work as she’d given up her career when their dc1 was born, so it wasn’t like they needed the child care.

I realise this thread is about far worse than the boarding of very young children, but the thought of sending 7 year olds away from home reminded me of that man.

Alex Renton had a follow up programme on Radio 4 today. In a development which will surprise nobody, he had been contacted by many more now adult men who were abused as children by two of the teachers he mentioned in the main series last year, after the teachers went back to their native South Africa. Both are now fighting extradition to the UK, but one at least is likely to be tried in SA.

In one case, the teacher realised when he was a young man that he had inappropriate urges to engage in sexual acts with young boys so he sought treatment in SA. He was advised that there was nobody with the requisite skills there and sent to Edinburgh. He had treatment there for a few months as a voluntary patient and on leaving, enrolled in a teacher training college! Not very effective treatment, then. He abused boys in every school he taught in, from the sound of it. Not one single school contacted the police and had him arrested. He was repeatedly 'let go' and given a reference which enabled him to move to another school and start again. Those poor, poor little boys.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001gxfc