Everything that is written about the harm that happens to children who are sent away to school may also be true when children are taken into care. Every time, a child is removed from their home, it is a cause for concern, and no boarding school survivors are not the privileged elite that so many are inclined to label us with.
Instead, those of us who joined the boarding school survivors annual conference are those who admit that we have been badly hurt– we are some of the children who through no fault of their own, have been plucked from their homes and dumped in paid childcare. Like those families who had no choice when their children were removed into institutional care – termed ‘looked after children’, boarding school survivors also suffer from abandonment and are bereaved as they leave their homes and are kept captive in situations not of their own making. The adults who were supposed to care for children in unregulated boarding schools, more often than not, became the sources of great unhappiness for months if not years on end.
What I am saying is that it does not matter what your background is – if you are hurt as a child and nobody listens it is a travesty. Furthermore, it will colour who you become as an adult. Even if you end up with an outward appearance of coping, the child who has not been given the love and care when growing up may become trapped as their young selves in an adult body, in the adult world without the ability to feel their pain. When this happens, is it any wonder that these same supposedly successful adults may then inflict their indifference and hardness on others – you only have to look at many of our current politicians to see how harmful this is to the stability and peace in the world today.
The conference on November 9th was held at Friends House in Euston and over 100 of us gathered to meet up or reconnect and to participate in an awesome program of events. The board of the ‘Boarding School Survivors Support’ had used the idea of the boarding school survivor’s journey as a way of reflecting on our experience and subsequent development.
- Understanding what has happened to us
- Reconnecting with the damaged child within
- Finding compassion – and help – for the task
- Reframing relationships with self and others
I have often noticed how the neglect and trauma experience of women and girls is relegated to second place in the world of boarding school survival. It seems obvious when the boys, now men, more than women, have such dramatic survival stories of physical and sexual abuse. Of course, it is urgent that such violence must be stopped, and the survivors given every kind of help to recover. However, in so doing, we must not forget that there is a silence which surrounds the control, coercion, bullying, emotional abuse and neglect which is by far the most prevalent experience for both genders, but especially for girls at boarding school. The suffering created in these supposedly benign institutions can be further compounded when such ‘soft’ traumas remain unseen, and the seriousness of the long-term consequences is undermined through lack of attention.
The speakers represented a range of experiences and illustrated the non-linear way in which we visit the different stages of this journey. But it was especially good to hear a female perspective starting with a talk given by Person Irresponsible and the amazing journey she made walking the Pacific Crest trail on the west coast of America, during the pandemic. She describes how she came to terms with her boarding school past and started a different sort of journey to recover her real self. She also brought to light the less considered problems experienced exclusively by what are termed ‘third culture kids’. Those children whose parents lived overseas often found themselves unceremoniously dumped into a British boarding school which was totally alien to their home culture. This is very important to consider today, when more and more children sent to boarding school are being drawn from non-British families located overseas, and are now thought to make up over half the school population.
Person Irresponsible talked about the difficulties the children from overseas felt when we literally landed in a cold, unwelcoming environment, with unfamiliar food and customs. Those of us whose parents often moved around the globe during our childhood, have found it extremely difficult to form any sense of ‘home’ in our adult lives. She also brought up the historic difficulties of communicating with your family when they were located abroad when letter writing was the only channel to reach your parents for the duration -usually for at least a school term, if not more.
One of the speakers, Anne Power, spoke about the difficulties boarding school survivors find in maintaining intimate relationships later in life. Failed marriages are probably more common amongst boarding school survivors, although there is no demonstrable data to support this at the present time, purely because such research is not in existence as yet.
Caroline Rollings and Chris Braitch both shared their personal stories and like all the survivors who had contributed so far, there was such a feeling of compassion and empathy throughout the room as we heard the pain which the speakers faced as young children and continued to experience, albeit often in a suppressed form as they grew up. Chris Braitch gave an excellent presentation as he shared how he has turned around his very traumatic experiences of his childhood, by founding ‘Seen & Heard’.
Seen & Heard is a platform which gives ex-boarding school and independent school pupils access to a wide variety of resources and actively seeks to increase the number of therapists and coaches available to survivors. Seen & heard
- Provides well-being support for ex-pupils via the website.
- Outreach to schools and universities to raise awareness and improve welfare and emotional health for current students.
- Campaigns for improvements to legislation and codes of conduct for safeguarding and emotional health.
After lunch the delegates divided themselves into self-selected groups to attend the choices of workshop, loosely associated with the different stages on the journey as described above. We then came back to the main auditorium for feedback and reflection.
The catering was superb as was the venue, but of course the main benefit of attending such a day was the feeling of solidarity and connection that such a gathering brings. Being a boarding school survivor has been uniformly described as a lonely experience; the difficulties of being abandoned by our parents to a paid institution cannot be over-estimated, when in the majority of instances our child-selves have been subjected to emotional neglect and/or abuse; we have also suffered through the loss of our home-life and find ourselves captive in the intended school, without any ability to reverse the situation. We, who have often thought of ourselves as ‘the only one’ or ‘the problem’ take great comfort in finding out that it is the boarding school system that is the root cause of our problems. Not withstanding the fact that certain individuals within it, have abused their position either to enact harm upon us, or as is more often the case, chosen to turn the other way, giving us children, no chance of reprieve.
Coming soon is a documentary ‘Boarding on Insanity’ created by Piers Cross (boarding school survivor activist) in conjunction with film maker Ben Cole. This features the stories of boarding school survivors, with commentary from Gabor Mate and others giving rise to discussion on the wide-reaching effects of boarding school on national & global politics.
For anyone reading this who has suffered as a result of boarding school or has not realised the harm caused when young children are made to suffer in this way, please see the resources below.
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.