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June 29, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Anyone who to wants to be thoroughly depressed and dis-edified can read victims’ testimonies of sexual abuse in UK schools, on the website Everyone’s Invited. I’m not providing a live link because the content can be quite graphic, but it is not difficult to find. One distinctive aspect of the website is that it has attracted testimonials from elite, independent (fee-paying) schools, and elite universities. Up until now those of us interested in these matters have been looking at reports into schools at the other end of the spectrum of privilege. It has apparently come as a surprise to some that the abuse of schoolchildren by each other is not limited to drug-addled delinquents from broken homes in public housing projects. No, it goes all the way up the social hierarchy: along with the drugs and the broken homes.

There has always been a problem of bullying at elite boarding schools, and when historic boys’ schools started admitting girls in about the 1980s, the results were entirely predictable. It is difficult to understand how anyone remotely concerned with children’s welfare, rather than educational fads and profit-margins, could have thought it was a good idea. I remember when a major Catholic boarding school went co-educational, there was endless talk about the exciting educational opportunities, how they’d have mixed-voice choirs and girls playing the female parts in plays, and all the rest. Then a senior member of the management admitted in private: “If we’re honest, we did it for the money.”

The toxic environment which has led to what is clearly endemic sexual abuse in many schools is not simply a matter of having boys and girls together in the same institution, however. Schools, again acting on the fads which seem to act as a substitute for common-sense in parts of the education sector, have gone to enormous lengths to break down children’s natural sexual reserve. The idea that some kinds of sexual behavior are objectively inappropriate is something which must never be said in a classroom. Everything — even things which are actually illegal or immediately physically harmful — is morally acceptable, children are repeatedly told, if there is consent. Not to think so is an indication not of emotional maturity or sexual integrity, but at best of being inhibited, and probably of bigotry as well. After all, how can you respect others’ choices, if you have any sense of sexual standards for yourself?

What this means is that while the official message is that everyone has the right to say “no”, saying “no” is the mark of being uncool or actually a bad person. Schools have handed potential rapists a new and powerful arsenal of psychological techniques they can use to put pressure on their victims.

Of course, few teachers believe this message themselves: in its implications, it is an extreme form of sexual libertinism incompatible with long-term relationships and family life. What they actually think of the child-victims of the intense social pressure to agree to sexual acts is revealing. One testimony on Everyone’s Invited described how when boys shared nude photos of the girls with each other, it was the girls who were blamed from creating the images in the first place, at the insistence of their boyfriends. In response to another testimony, by a girl who was abused at parties, headteacher Tim Gibbs of a school in Norfolk in the east of England told a local newspaper:

It's horrible to hear that she has put herself in such a vulnerable position at these 'parties' time and time again and I expect she will be upset by it for a very long time.

There is any eerie parallel with the attitude of police and social workers to the girls abused by the U.K.’s rape gangs. Oh dear, they said: these girls are making really terrible decisions. Remarks such as these sit at the uneasy interface between the official view, that no decision made with consent can be criticized, and what they really think, which is that in the often-terrible suffering, and sometimes deaths, of these young women, they are reaping the consequences of slatternly behavior.

Anyone with a real concern for children’s welfare would say that, on the one hand, their supposed consent is very frequently itself extorted by coercive bullying, and on the other, the school is responsible for facilitating the culture in which this bullying has traction. It is not just that the boys expect (say) all the new girls to perform sexual acts if they don’t want to be completely ostracized, but that in many schools every department — English literature, science, geography, religious education — is devoted to conveying the message to pupils that sexual restraint is tantamount to a mental illness.

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Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and is the editor of The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and Secretary of Una Voce International. He teaches Philosophy in Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.