Triggered

It started with a Facebook post advertising a high school reunion.  We are all in our fifties now, and the poster was casting around to see if anyone else wanted to organise the next reunion, as he had arranged the last two.

There were the usual ‘Yes, well maybe’ responses as everyone hoped someone else would make a credible offer to be the facilitator.  In the course of reminiscences, the conversation took a dark turn. 

One of the bluff, hearty, harmless middle aged alumni asked for an opinion as to what teachers were the best, the worst, and the ‘cookiest’.  I responded with the well-known fact that one of the English teachers, known for his sangfroid, if not his looks, had slept with a number of the female students.

In fact, the teacher involved would throw parties, invite good-looking vulnerable students, and then pick a year twelve girl to honour with his attentions.  Year after year. We girls giggled at the thought, some in horror, others in mild envy. 

He was balding, with long curly hair over his ears and a relentlessly ‘modern’ attitude.  I believe he may have been a good teacher.  We all knew, at the time that this was going on, and had an idea as to whom he was sleeping with at any given time. 

But another story emerged not long after in the same Facebook thread.  One of the male students, a vulnerable fourteen year old boy with newly divorced parents, had been groomed and enticed into a sexual relationship with a female teacher.  The relationship had gone on for quite a while, and when the harm to him had become too great, he suddenly left school. 

Many people had known about this relationship, including other teachers, and nobody had rescued the boy. He had felt ostracised and isolated and only now, in his fifties, was he coming to terms with what had happened to him. 

What had started off almost as a joking thread had now become very real.  Another woman had engaged in a relationship with a teacher, although she was reluctant to name the teacher.  A further student had fought off the advances of the same teacher.

Suddenly, someone mentioned me by name- ‘You had a relationship with a teacher, didn’t you?’ I was completely thrown.  Yes, I replied, but that was after school finished, and he never actually taught me.  I remembered him with some fondness.  I never came to any harm. 

She replied, ‘He was totally grooming you.’ It threw me for a six- was he?  It never felt wrong to me. I had finished school before the affair truly started and we had been drawn together by mutual friends and an interest in other activities.

I was seventeen when it started, not a virgin and not exactly a child. He was nine years older, at 26.  The relationship lasted for about eight months and then we parted ways, he went back to his previous girlfriend, an ex-student at his previous school, and married her.  Our relationship became an anecdote, useful to shock people at dinner parties.

Other things happened, and in time I nearly forgot about the relationship, and how miserable I was for over a year after it ended. It was as if I had lost a mentor as well as a lover, that was a fact I remembered well, and certainly I didn’t date for my first two years at university.   I never really gave the relationship much attention or thought until a cheerful Facebook discussion became rowdy, and then actively unpleasant. 

Were there really two separate realities in my old high school, those who were sexually abused, and those who weren’t?  How could so many people have remained oblivious, if not totally uncaring, teachers included, about what went on right under their noses?  How could so many students have known about these relationships, and parents were never told, or if the facts were disclosed, chose not to interfere?  How could we reframe these relationships, and the harms that they involved, under the pitiless glare of #MeToo?

A lot of time has passed since high school.  We have married, divorced, had children and sometimes grandchildren. High school ended so many years ago. But then we have podcasts such as Hedley Thomas and “Teacher’s Pet”, which details teachers and their sexual relationships with high school students on the northern beaches in the eighties.

We have police strike forces formed to establish criminality and perhaps lay charges, and yet at my sleepy suburban high school, years later, such abuses were still occurring, and nobody, teachers, students or parents, seemed to care enough to stop them.

How can we establish what harms occurred?  The young man was clearly harmed, and very seriously, he was forced to leave the school and his abuser remains unpunished. Thirty five years later he is finally, and courageously, discussing it.  Many others on the thread, some of whom were known to have had relationships with teachers, have remained silent.  They choose to not discuss, not to even disclose.

And my own relationship that I have remembered so fondly, should I, too, reframe it, by assuming a power differential which I did not believe was present at the time? Should I re-examine my affair in the light of my deepest beliefs, that relationships between teachers and high school pupils are always harmful?  Did I, in fact, let my teacher off on a technicality, in which he did not commence a sexual relationship with me until just after the HSC, and therefore was not culpable?

This is deeply ambivalent, and unpleasant territory.  And now, as an adult, in my fifties, in a place of peace and security, I feel that I must indeed, reframe history.  The gradient of power, the age differential, the murky, undrawn boundaries between genuine affection and sexual exploitation, the fact that he never truly loved me, the sexual initiation into behaviours I was not comfortable with and not ready for, and the subsequent shame which was the result after the affair ended, were clearly deeply unpleasant and damaging.

I believed I was being discreet, when I put it all behind me after it finished.  Now I must recognise that I was being complicit.  Silence, in this instance, was a form of consent, to acts and behaviours I was not ready or able to consent to. 

His behaviour was exploitative, and I should not put a gradient of culpability on teachers who have sex with students.  His actions did, in fact, colour my life and relationships.  His choice of me, no doubt, was related to youth, naivety and vulnerability as much as the physical and intellectual relationship I believed it to be at the time. 

My parents, too, were culpable in their self-absorption during their divorce, neither noticed or cared enough to discuss it with me, and that, too, was likely a factor in his choice of me.

I cannot feel angry at him, after all these years, although I believe I should.  I can only feel sad, and possibly encouraged, that my brand-newly teenaged daughter, in her gawky, blossoming beauty, will never be uncared about enough, or vulnerable enough to be seduced by a person who should have had her welfare at heart. 

The world is a different, hopefully better place, now, than it was then. But every high school I knew from those times, had a ‘me’ or several in it. 

#MeToo