Triggered

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