'Abuse on Abuse': Parents' Anguish over School's Handling of Sex Abuse & Female Abusers

By Angus Thompson

Parents at a prestigious NSW private school have accused the school of heaping “abuse on abuse” over its handling of a sexual affair involving a female staff member and five male students.

The 25-year-old woman pleaded guilty in April this year to months of having sex with students as young as 15 while working at the school.

This follows the jailing in February of a former Sydney Grammar School female teacher (4th story on link) for having sex with a male student.

A father caught up in the scandal at the other NSW private school told The Herald  he and his wife held fears their son would harm himself during the fallout from the incident.

"All of these boys were victims under their (the school's) duty of care, an institution supposedly providing a safe place for the boys during their education," the father said.

His wife said that her son believed he was to blame for the abuse. "When [the staff member] pleaded guilty, he was like, 'it's not my fault?'" the mother said. "All the time, he felt that it was his fault." Her son was 15 at the time the offences took place.

The details of the case have been largely concealed by suppression orders prohibiting publication of the name, location and type of the school, as well as the name of the woman and her role within the school.

But in an extraordinary revolt, parents of affected students now want the school to be named, claiming educators need to be held accountable for their failure to properly care for the teenagers.

"Stating the school's name makes the situation real, makes parents aware that this school does exist and that, as parents, they should not be ignorant of the fact that it too could happen in their child's school," one mother said in an email to Department of Public Prosecutions solicitors seen by The Herald.

Why protect one school when Sydney Grammar School was not protected. Why protect schools at all. You should be protecting children, not schools.

It's understood NSW District Court judge Christopher Armitage will hear an application to lift the orders when the case returns for sentencing in September.

Some parents allege their sons received inadequate support, in the form of counselling, from the school, and that they weren't communicated to properly about developments in the matter.

These claims formed part of a detailed list of questions the The Herald put to the school, including whether the school believed it had breached its duty of care to the students. A spokesman for the school said: “As the matter is still before the courts, [we] will not be making any comment at this time.”

A court previously heard the staff member exchanged text and social media messages with the students, understood to be aged between 15 and 17 at the time, and arranged to meet them for sex. She had asked them to change her name in their mobile phones and to delete messages of their conversations.

It's understood the offences took place between late 2014 and September 2015, when the behaviour was reported by a third party. In an October 2017 letter sent to the school, a mother said she had been "alarmed" by several examples of inaction by those in senior school positions.

"It is unfortunate and alarming that a family could feel as though the school did not care about what had happened to their son," the mother wrote.

In a letter of reply, the chairman of the school board apologised to the family and said the headmaster admitted his communication had been "unsatisfactory". "It is clearly not what any of us would have wanted for your son and it is deeply regretted by all of us," the chairman wrote, adding the school intended to conduct a "full and formal review" of its procedures after legal proceedings had finished.

The scandal will also form part of the mountain of material before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse following one mother's submission.

"The school let the boys down. We feel this has been abuse upon abuse," she alleged.

In his response, Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald AM said the woman's contribution "would help make a difference. I note with deep concern your detailed account of the school's responses and the actions of senior staff," he wrote.

The woman will be sentenced in September after pleading guilty to six counts of sexual intercourse with a person under her care and three counts of aggravated sexual intercourse.

It comes after Bronwen Williams, a former teacher at Sydney Grammar School, was in February sentenced to at least seven months behind bars after the 34-year-old pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual intercourse with a person under her care over three months in 2016.

Court papers reveal that Williams, pregnant when she was sentenced, gave birth to a baby daughter by her husband on May 9. She was told two days earlier that she would not be able to keep her baby at the mother and children's program at the correctional facility.

Williams met up with the victim at her home, a classroom and a school storage cupboard, previously told the court she thought at the time they were involved in a “very mutual love ­affair”. She has since said she was “deeply sorry”.

According to District Court judge Paul Lakatos, the teenage boy said in his victim impact statement that Williams' domineering insistence made him feel he had few rights or personal choice in what was happening.

Judge Lakatos said she had placed her own needs above those of the victim.

I'm not sure 'needs' is the correct term here.

What the criminologist says

Adult women who pursue teenage boys in cases of sexual abuse are often trying to substitute failed relationships with older men, a criminologist says.

Dr Xanthe Mallett, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Newcastle, said that in cases of abuse involving female offenders, the motivation was not necessarily sexual, but due to being able to exert control in situations where they previously hadn't.

"It's not necessarily about the sex with these offenders," Dr Mallett told The Sun-Herald.

"They have more emotional control over them (the victim) because of their age."

The Herald does not suggest these comments account for the motivations of the offenders in the adjoining article.

"It's an emotional need with these women rather than a sexual predation on younger males," she said.

Dr Mallett said there was little statistical evidence on such behaviours as reporting of incidents was rare.

"Reporting in this area of females offending against children is really low. Often the teenage boys feel they are in a meaningful relationship with these women," she said.

Between the ages of 13 and 16 boys become sexually aware but are still emotionally immature, making them vulnerable to older, more emotionally mature people, she said.

Dr Mallett said there was a stigma attached to males reporting situations of abuse by older women.

Choate Rosemary Hall, a Very Private School, Publicly Catalogs Its Sins

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, sent a searing report on sexual abuse to nearly 14,000 members of its community. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

For so many years, when schools learned that teachers were sexually abusing students, the strategy was to keep it quiet. Handle it in-house. Make it go away.

On Thursday, Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, turned that method on its head. At 4:30 p.m., nearly 14,000 members of the Choate community, including alumni, parents and faculty, received an email with a sterile title, “Message to the Choate Rosemary Hall Community,” and a link to a searing report describing decades of sexual abuse at the school.

The revelations at Choate are just the latest in several admissions of sexual abuse of students at some of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools. But by issuing a detailed catalog of the school’s failure to deal with the problem over four decades, Choate drew a measure of praise and support not seen at other schools, like Horace Mann, the New York private school, and St. George’s, the Rhode Island boarding school, which victims and some alumni accused of stonewalling investigations into sexual abuse.

“This is very, very different,” said Roderick MacLeish, a lawyer who has represented many victims of sexual abuse, including one who was molested at Choate.

But, Mr. MacLeish said, “This didn’t just happen because everyone got together and decided it was the right thing to do. This happened because of publicity, and because of an evolving understanding of how sexual abuse is a catastrophic event that transforms people’s lives.”

Many parents and alumni expressed support for the school on Friday, relieved that after so many years of smothering the news, administrators presented a clear public accounting. The report, by an investigator at an outside law firm, named former faculty members who had molested or raped students, and it described how administrators contributed to an atmosphere of secrecy and an impunity that allowed the assaults to metastasize.

“As long as no one was talking about it, then it was growing and breeding,” said Cheryl Hart, whose daughter is a day student at Choate. “Now it feels to me like the kids are less vulnerable. I hope I’m not being naïve, but that’s my feeling.”

The report was released days after the deadline for incoming students to sign contracts to attend Choate, which costs $57,000 a year for students who live on campus. The school said the timing was coincidental and was based on when the report was completed and a board meeting that was scheduled more than a year ago. Schools do not get much more elite — or wealthy — than Choate, whose famous alumni include President John F. Kennedy, the actor Michael Douglas and Ivanka Trump.

Paul Mones, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual abuse, said the report was likely to create a safer environment for students. Nonetheless, he said, Choate does not deserve a “pat on the back.”

“They did it because they were forced to,” Mr. Mones said, noting that The Boston Globe ran a story about abuse at the school in October. “They saw the way the wind was blowing, and they knew they had to get out ahead of it.”

“These are smart people,” he continued. “They knew they had to do something.”

Choate’s openness is a long time in coming. Revelations of systemic sexual abuse of children stretch back to 2002, when abuse by Catholic priests received widespread attention after a series of articles published in The Globe.

Next, the revelations hit schools. In 2011, Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State, was arrested, and later convicted, on charges of rampant sexual abuse; it became clear that the university had willfully averted its eyes, allowing his attacks to go on for years. In 2012, an article in The New York Times Magazine chronicled abuse at Horace Mann from the 1970s to the 1990s.

There is now a lengthy roll of elite institutions that have faced similar revelations in recent years, including Deerfield Academy and the Fessenden School in Massachusetts, and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.

Staff sex abuse at 110+ New England private schools

Several schools proactively undertook investigations last year in response to a Boston Globe inquiry that found staff at more than 110 private schools in New England had faced allegations of sexual misconduct in the previous 25 years.

Because the schools involved are private, it is hard to tell whether the scandals have caused a dip in applications from new students or in their ability to raise funds. The prestige of graduating from these schools has not diminished, and they remain major funnels to the Ivy League.

Eric F. Peterson, head of school at St. George’s, said in a statement Friday that admissions and fund-raising numbers had not been affected. “They have remained strong, at near record levels,” he said.

But the scandals have clearly taken a toll, as some schools have reached costly settlements with aggrieved students and lost top administrators.

St. George’s paid an undisclosed sum last year to at least 28 students. The amount was believed to be in the millions of dollars, as was a settlement reached by Horace Mann, initially with 32 students.

Experts have said that the prep schools have been prodded to be more transparent and to settle after watching what happened at Penn State, which agreed in 2013 to pay $59.7 million to 26 sexual abuse victims of Mr. Sandusky. Late last month, a jury convicted the former Penn State president of child endangerment for failing to stop the abuse.

By not reporting abuse allegations to authorities, Choate made it easier for those who had abused students to move to other schools without any red flags.

One teacher who did just that was Jaime Rivera-Murillo, a Spanish teacher who the report said raped a student while on a class trip to Costa Rica in 1999. He was fired from Choate but was never reported to authorities as Connecticut law required, and he went on to teach at several schools in the region, eventually becoming principal of Wamogo Regional High School in Litchfield, Conn. He resigned from the school last week.

On Friday, the superintendent and school board of Regional School District 6, which oversees Wamogo, sent a letter to the community saying they had not known that Mr. Rivera-Murillo had worked at Choate until recently.

“The fact that any school would not report alleged sexual abuse to D.C.F. and law enforcement is alarming,” the district’s letter said, referring to the state’s Department of Children and Families.

Attempts to contact Mr. Rivera-Murillo were unsuccessful.

Many schools are conducting more rigorous background checks when hiring staff and training employees to recognize grooming behaviors among adults. Several have developed anonymous tip lines and created confidential areas where students can discuss their concerns. Choate has set up a fund to help alumni pay for therapy expenses.

But the school’s new openness had its limits. Calls to 18 members of the school’s board of trustees resulted in either unreturned calls or polite refusals to talk.

A spokeswoman for the school, Lorraine S. Connelly, said that “The Board spoke in a unified and heartfelt way in yesterday’s community letter,” and felt that it spoke for itself.

Connecticut