I RESEARCHED SEXUAL MISCONDUCT WHEN I was writing my novel No Safe Place, which is about a young woman at university who says a student counsellor sexualised their counselling relationship. I went to a conference at the University of Sydney where I heard the accounts of women and men who had been sexually abused by teachers and priests and therapists who put their own sexual needs before their duty of care.
The harm was terrible. I saw how those people at the conference, some who’d been abused as children, others as teenagers or adults, shook with emotion. Most had not been able to fulfil their potential, their years marked by addiction, self-harm, an inability to form lasting relationships. Some were gone already. They’d taken their own lives, and a family member was telling their story. It was shocking to me what these people had suffered. It frightened me, if I’m honest.
I can remember thinking at the time that what happened to them was not the same as what happened in my life. I am not a victim of anything, I told myself. I will not call myself a victim. I will not call my teacher and her husband perpetrators. Words like that made me uncomfortable. Surely if there was fault here it belonged with me. I brought it upon myself. I’d been a troubled teen. They had helped me. Wasn’t that what happened?
Later, I wanted desperately to believe I had agency, choice. My first therapist, Mick, was at pains to make me see the world this way. I gave them a special power to hurt me. I could take my power back. I spent a long time thinking this way.
Wayne, the therapist I went to see after I accidentally hurt Otis with the stroller clip, became exasperated only once in the time we were meeting. I’d maintained my view that what had happened with my teacher and her husband was my responsibility, that I’d been the one who’d done wrong, or I’d given them my power, as Mick said, and I could take it back. Wayne and I had come up against this more than once.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said this particular day. ‘But I just don’t see that you gave them a special power to hurt you.’ He was quoting me quoting Mick. ‘I don’t see that you had any power at all. I really don’t.’ He was shaking his head in frustration.
Wayne had asked me, when I’d first gone to see him and told him about the counselling I’d already done, why I hadn’t gone back to see Mick. I told him that David and I had become friends with Mick and Mick’s wife Suzi. We had even gone to their wedding.
Mick became friends with many of his clients. When I started reading about sexual misconduct to research No Safe Place, I learned that counsellors are not supposed to make friends with their clients. It’s one of those relationships where power is unequal. At the time, it didn’t bother me, as Mick had never misused our relationship for his own gain.
Although Wayne never said anything about this, over time, I began to realise that Mick’s way of seeing the world suited him, but he was wrong about me. He was wrong to believe that, at sixteen, I gave my teacher and her husband, a couple in their late twenties with much more life experience than me, my power. He was wrong that my teacher, who had a duty of care, was just like any other person in my life. And he was wrong to befriend me.
When Suzi left Mick some years ago, she and I remained friends. I knew she and Mick had got together when she was twenty-one and he was forty. But he was also her work supervisor when they met, she told me. And, I learned, he had been counselling her on a personal level. He had mixed a work relationship, a counselling relationship and a sexual relationship with someone who had much less life experience.
Suzi has been one of the few people in my life who understands, at a visceral level, some of what happened to me. It happened to her too.
There’s not much nuance in the language we have to describe sexual misconduct and there’s probably not a lot of nuance in the reality either. There are victims and perpetrators and rape is always rape, as Stace once said to me. But while courts try to apportion blame based on age and maturity, coercion and consent, people like me who’ve actually experienced this kind of betrayal can no longer live the trusting lives we might have. I think this has been the hardest thing, learning to trust again that people won’t betray me.
Still, I remained uncomfortable describing my relationship with my teacher and her husband as sexual abuse, and I was uncomfortable describing what happened to me on the beach at Redcliffe as rape. I was sixteen when the relationship started, the age of consent in Queensland. I’d consented to everything that happened, hadn’t I? And the memory of the beach came much later than the event itself, however clearly it came. And anyway, I had sex with my teacher’s husband after I came home from Melbourne. So does the rape count? As for my teacher, I loved my teacher, and I thought she loved me.
The American novelist and essayist Mary Gaitskill wrote an essay in HQ about two experiences. In the first, she was overwhelmed by a man in the street who dragged her into a dark alley and raped her. In the second, she was on a date and said no to sex. The man raped her. When she told her friend, she said this second experience of rape felt worse than the first, that she wasn’t even sure she could call it rape. Her friend said, ‘You were raped, all right—you raped yourself.’ Mary Gaitskill said she didn’t like hearing her friend say this, but she also knew that it was true. I raped myself. I raped myself. There’s something in this that felt true to me, not in terms of rape but in terms of the entire relationship with my teacher and her husband. How did I let myself, a strong young woman on her way to the world, get waylaid by these people who were bound to cause me harm? How did I not see? How did I not protect myself? Why did I go along with what they were doing for so long?
It must be very difficult for courts to apportion blame in cases where young adults or adults have been in these relationships. I cannot now understand what I saw in my teacher and her husband. In those years of my late teens, it was something akin to a cult, where the people I saw and the actual people were a long way apart, but I didn’t know that, and I was so isolated that no one else was providing an alternative view. My teacher was my teacher and then a leader of religious curriculum development. Her husband was an officer in the army. Their status in the community legitimised them, legitimised what they did, so that even in my mind, it became me, the troubled teenager, who did wrong, not them. I believed this for years. And my family; we were not a ‘normal’ family, as I’ve said. I think shame fit me snugly. It wasn’t until I met someone like David, until Brian met my teacher’s husband, until I saw Wayne in therapy, that I started to see an alternative view.
When I have told my story—and I have had to tell it to many people now, people who have known me for years and known none of it—some people say they believe me innocent and my teacher and her husband guilty. They shake their heads and say they can’t believe those people could have done what they did. I’m not sure if they say it to be kind, or if they really do think my teacher and her husband are evil people. But I can’t join with my friends, even knowing everything I know now.
I have said this is my story. I am the point-of-view character, the unreliable narrator of my own life. I think if this story were told from another point of view, those friends who vilify my teacher and her husband might see things differently. For instance, as I read back over what I have written, I see I have made much of the fact that we agreed we would not tell anyone I was pregnant to protect my teacher’s husband’s commission. This is true from my point of view, and it looks cowardly of my teacher’s husband. But for him, I am sure it was galling to lie. He was generally a loyal and courageous person who owned his mistakes. He already had a wife. She was unwell, potentially unable to bear children, and vulnerable. He stuck by his wife, the first promise he’d made, and left me, to whom he’d made no promise, to cope alone.
This may just be the novelist in me who can always see at least two sides of a situation, or the last remnants of the cult-like brainwashing I suffered, but if we could go down to the beach at Redcliffe that night from my teacher’s husband’s point of view, I know we would see an entirely different scene. I suspect he wouldn’t even recognise himself the way I have written him. He would think I was writing about another experience, another him, another me. She was there, he would say, a willing partner in consummating our relationship. She had a great time. In his story, we both lost control because we were really living. My teacher’s husband used to say that some people remain on the sidelines their whole lives, never take risks, watch, criticise. ‘If you really live,’ he said, ‘and I mean really live, you make mistakes, but you also do some good.’ I think he believed this.
So what were these two relationships then, from their point of view? A teacher unsure of her own sexuality becoming involved with a young student? A woman whose husband’s needs are overwhelming? A woman wanting to help a student and things go wrong? And my teacher’s husband. A rapist? A man losing control? A well-meaning but deeply damaged man doing damage to someone else?
I read a paper put out by the US Congress, gathering the research that’s been done into educator sexual misconduct. That’s what they call it when teachers have sex with students. They spent a good deal of time on the terminology, considered ‘sexual abuse’ rather than ‘misconduct’, but decided this put too much emphasis on the victim and whether they suffered harm, rather than on the teacher and his or her conduct. The matter of what to name students was considered too. ‘Targets’, they decided. ‘Complainant’ made it sound legal and alleged, ‘victim’ took away a student’s power. Target, because they were targeted.
In a way, it doesn’t much matter what terminology I use, or what the motivations of my teacher or her husband were. They did harm, great harm, and to more than one person. There are children born from the relationships here, children who don’t have a choice where they’ve come from, children who one way or another have to live with the consequences of other people’s actions. My daughter, my son. Their daughter.
At the conference in Sydney, I listened to Dr Carolyn Quadrio, a psychiatrist who still works with victims of sexual abuse. Dr Quadrio spoke angrily of the harm that had been done, the perpetrators who offended again and again, the lack of safeguards, the sense of betrayal. ‘If you could understand what such a betrayal of trust means to someone, you would make sure it never happened again,’ she said. Her drive and energy made the world feel safer.
In much of the research I did in order to write No Safe Place and to understand what happened to me, I found the disturbing fact that adults who have sex with children and young people offend more than once. When I read this, I thought back on my teacher, her husband, wondered if there were other young people like me they harmed, people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. I wished I’d understood the harm earlier, realised how young I was. It might have meant I made a complaint to someone, perhaps even helped someone else.
Last year, I read a self-help book that suggested I sit around a campfire in my mind with my teacher and her husband and try to understand them. I did this, mentally sat around that imaginary campfire with my imaginary teacher and her husband. In my head, my teacher’s husband told me he’d been sexually abused as a boy by a family friend. My imaginary teacher told me she’d been abused by her alcoholic father. They were just plain damaged, same as all of us. They were not bad people. They were deeply flawed. They didn’t set out to make me responsible for what we did. They just didn’t have the courage to live, despite what they thought about themselves.
My teacher and her husband asked me to keep secrets that have done harm. They took my voice as a young woman, took it for all these years. They contributed fundamentally to a situation where I was faced, as a young woman, with a decision, a Sophie’s choice, to give my child to strangers.
I spent my twenties and thirties living a short distance from my body, like Joyce’s Mr Duffy. I was in my forties and the mother of another child before I began to close that distance.
I have to let my teacher and her husband go, or be consumed by them. I have to let them go, dive in with that ten-year-old girl, put one arm up and over, the other arm up and over, and breathe. In this way, I go forward in the water, I swim.