Teacher’s Pet: Groomed at School (Crime Documentary) | Real Stories

and it seemed so contemporary it felt like somehow the filmmaker had taken this archival footage out of the past and somehow there was sort of collision that was really powerful so that you could never feel like you were watching something that wasn't completely pertinent to the moment that we're living in right now it echoes i think for us what we hope for our film which is to really grab your attention and really make you think and don't look away be prepared right from the very start and throughout for franklin confronting descriptions of child sexual abuse that some viewers may find upsetting he said and i can remember quite clearly he said you really don't know how to kiss do you i'm going to have to teach you and at that point he kissed me in a sexual way i knew that there was an ending to this i knew there was a price to be paid and i would pay that price at the end of each of these outings and that's when i'm pretty sure that's when i first we first kissed and when we first had oil he i gave him oral sex i was 13 and he was he would have been 27. in the last five years in the uk over 200 teachers have been struck off as a result of sexual misconduct with their students in this film we'll hear from three victims who were abused by the people they should have been able to trust the most [Music] 48 year old rachel is a freelance journalist and head of media and communications at a large international charity so this box is my life really so it's mainly kind of school stuff like prize day weekends and awards that i won at school [Music] i grew up in a town called cleveland which is near to blackpool it was a very 80s northern childhood so you know you had fish and chips on a friday for tea and you always had gravy on your chips because that's what us northerners do i love you very much daddy and i hope you have happy father's day love from rachel and what always makes me laugh about this card is it said i think i love you i'm not entirely sure but i think i do my dad was very very strict with me about my education because he wanted me to have all the things that he didn't have that is a very old photo but that is me and my dad and i don't i don't have that many pictures of me and my dad so when i see them it's really lovely because when he died he was 48 and when you're a kid that seems really old and now you just think before he was like so young [Applause] my dad had had an epileptic attack he was upstairs in the bedroom he had fallen onto the bed and because he was unconscious whilst having the attack he had essentially suffocated it's a cliche to say the bottom fell out of your world but i mean it just it just wasn't real it was just kind of he just wanted to rewind the tape and it to be different the next day rachel attempted to carry on life as normal and went back to school and getting out that car and actually walking through the school gates was was really really hard i felt like everyone in the in the playground just stared at me and i just realized that other people just didn't know what to say but waiting at the school gates was a familiar friendly face rachel's teacher and deputy head graham wilcock [Music] for me graham sort of um filled that a bit of a hole that had been left not the entire hall obviously but i sort of saw him as a friend and everybody loved him the parents thought he was great he was a great teacher he was extremely popular he was funny he was intelligent and i think also feeling like i couldn't talk to my mum because i didn't want to upset her so who did i talk to about all these feelings i had about my dad if you're a predator you're going to be looking out for the risk how risky is it that i'm going to be caught so am i able to groom this person am i able to groom the environment around that person do they have any issues that i can manipulate are they having any problems at home are they missing something at home that i can offer them so vulnerability isolation risk all these factors will be considered by the perpetrator when selecting their perfect victim over the next few weeks rachel's bond with her teacher grew as he encouraged her to spend more and more time alone with him he had an office and i'd go and sit in his office and just sit and talk to him for kind of ages and with hindsight it just seems really obvious to anyone like why on earth would anybody let a young girl whose father had died sit in an office for two hours with a man who was 28 years old was there not something weird going on but you have to remember this was the 80s and it was just a different mindset people just didn't see sexual abuse they didn't think about it really to be honest and then the day before the start of the easter holidays he called me into his office and said oh i won't see you now until after the holidays and gave me a hug and then he said give me a kiss so i just gave him a kiss on the cheek but only like a you know innocent not anything but he said and i can remember quite clearly he said you really don't know how to kiss do you i'm going to have to teach you and at that point he kissed me in a sexual way [Music] 54 year old writer graham caveney has spent 40 years coming to terms with the abuse he endured as a child at the hands of his head teacher [Music] i was the only child of working class parents in a small town in lancashire called accrington it was a tight-knit catholic community so life revolved around the church everyone seemed to know each other it felt good i was a good boy yeah my dad used to nicknamed me little lord fontilroy that was quite bookish very studious very i suppose obedience graham did well in his studies passed his 11 plus and gained a place at the local grammar school this felt like hitting the jackpot not that there's anything wrong with the world in which i grew up but it meant no more manual labor it meant maybe being a teacher or being a civil servant or a white collar job and this made the local paper this was a story in the akrington observer about me getting to um saint mary's college and there was no conversation that happened with my mum in which she didn't drop in that her son was going to go to saint mary's [Music] at saint mary's catholic school pupils were taught by a mixture of priests and teachers and at the helm was its enigmatic headmaster father kevin o'neill he was like a rock star he was a young hip priest who didn't always wear the collar he used to wear brill cream in his hair he looks a bit like a teddy boy and he didn't even use the father bit everyone called him the rev kev his name was father kevin o'neill [Music] for two years graham made the most of the wonderful opportunity he had been given and then i was 14 just gone 14 when um rev kev took me under his wing graham embraced all that father o'neill had to offer which included going on special school trips together he was taking me to see french films or films by fellini at the local cinema club he was taking me to the royal exchange theatre in manchester he was leading me books by kafka and beckett and reading my bad teenage poetry and telling me that it was it was interesting so you were spellbound by him but it wasn't just literature that father o'neill introduced him to he also encouraged graham to drink he'd been using alcohol on our various trips out and there was a parent teacher's evening and he'd got me a job working behind the bar illegally i was 14 years old i shouldn't have been doing it i got drunk i had access to all this alcohol the details become blurry but it was that one evening that he took me back to the house he shared with other priests in blackburn and that night was the first night that you sexually abused me what did he say afterwards to you he said one word he said sorry and then through a towel a kind of um towel towards me and asked me to clean up and then he drove me home back to my parents and came in and explained why i'd been out all night and he saved my bacon from my parents because my parents would have been annoyed at me having been drunk he came in and he straightened everything out so i was sat between my parents who were crossed with me and the priest who sexually abused me how do you feel sick confused disembodied strangely dissociated from what was going on you feel as though something fundamental has shifted that nothing will ever be the same again when rachel rounds lost her father her teacher graham wilcock appeared to offer comfort and support but then aged just 13 he kissed her when they were alone it's very difficult to explain because i have to remember you talking about a 13 year old girl who had been a bit in love with him i suppose and felt a bit sort of special really that there was something special about me that that marked me out from from the other girls um and i remember then i went on holiday with a friend from school and i desperately wanted to tell her because i just wanted to kind of share it with it but there was another part of me that just knew that i couldn't um so i didn't and that's really where it all started that would have been six months to a year after things began with graham so it was right in the throes of it during that time in that picture so funny i was carrying around a rather large secret at that time and not one of those people in that picture had any idea [Music] after that first incident graham then began seeing her outside of school i'd see him at school quite a lot in his office i'd see him on bicycle rides at the beach and i would go round to his house in terms of the sexual nature of the relationship it developed into sort of petting and that kind of thing and then that sort of gradually um became more i think you've grown up don't even you think as a teenager you know everything and actually you realize you don't and you are still a child and i guess that makes okay you know what graham did worse because it's taking away somebody's innocence and that's what that's what he did to me now under graham's spell the so-called affair became increasingly sinister privately would be like i love you um and then at school the next day in front of the class it would be you're fat you're stupid and take the mickey out of me i can remember one time i lying naked on a bed in his house and he being fully clothed and him making comments about my body and that i was fat and and just feeling humiliated and um and disgusted at my own body i just remember thinking right okay i'm gonna show you i'm i'm not gonna be this fat person that you humiliate anymore so i just stopped eating pretty much and i lost two stone or something which when you're five foot nine you know kind of shows i mean it started as a sort of diet but it just got more and more and i developed anorexia author and personal development trainer lisa has lived in cornwall with her husband and daughter for the last four years i can honestly say i absolutely live my ideal life i really do i probably go to the beach most days not every day but i'd say most days i'm at the beach whether i'm just walking or i'll go for a swim in the sea it's a long way from australia where lisa grew up and attended school i found school quite frustrating i think and as a result of that i was i won't say i was really naughty or um destructively naughty i would say i was quite um i just found i was bored in a lot of the classes they didn't really stretch me lisa's main passion in life was music i had always loved music and i always loved to sing and you know when we had a rule in our house that i wasn't allowed to sing before seven o'clock in the morning because that was considered too early when lisa was 12 years old a new music teacher joined the school he started teaching me both in the general music class which was rubbish but i also had private guitar tuition from him mainly because i wanted to i mean i wasn't that interested in the guitar i mainly wanted to learn to accompany my own singing but also i just want to learn more about music the theory of music to to support my singing with their shared love of music lisa and her new mentor quickly formed a bond i've been having lessons with him for probably a term a couple of terms i can't remember exactly and one of the lessons i was really upset and i think i can't actually remember why i think i'd just had a row with one of my friends and i was a bit upset he gave me his phone number and said oh give me a call and i'll you know we'll have a chat and we can you know figure it out and i can help you and and so i started phoning him we started phoning him speaking on the phone quite regularly and that would happen probably two or three times a week i'd speak to him after school and that you know as a 13 year old that makes you feel very special [Music] lisa's parents gladly welcomed her inspirational new teacher into their home once a week he would have a meal at our house at um the family house and he'd been quite manipulative with my mum that when i was out of the room he would tell her about me and how he was really concerned because i was so wild i was so naughty and so uncontrolled and and that oh i was getting into drugs and i was you know really in with the naught you know like the like she got in with the wrong crowd of people lisa's teacher convinced her mother that only he could keep her on the straight and narrow but instead he used their lessons together to lead her increasingly astray i do remember time so i'm playing the guitar and i'm not doing um one of the fingerings correctly and then you know like he's leaning over me and there's kind of this moment where i turn to him and our heads are like this and there was yeah there was this incredible kind of chemistry and and i was sort of you know i was really aware he was my teacher you know and it's like oh is this going is this going is this going to go somewhere am i just imagining this because i and i had no reference point at all lisa and her teacher continued to call and see each other every day but things escalated when her teacher split up with his then partner there was this flip from he's the teacher kind of looking after me and then he'd sort of flipped it so i was now looking after him because he had this very sad and very upsetting thing and he you know sort of saying things like i don't think anyone will love me and i don't think i'll ever find anyone to really love me for who i am and and there's this kind of it was almost like this it was like an invitation you know it was like to for me to both support him and potentially i think there was this little opening of a crack of a door to like well would you be that person one day after class he suggested he'd take her out in his car for a drive he took me to mcdonald's and then we drove up into the mountains well into the um sort of just a local beauty spot i suppose and pulled off the road and that's when i'm pretty sure that's when i first we first kissed and when we first had all said he i gave him oral sex i was 13 and he was he would have been 27. [Music] at 11 years old graham caveney was the toast of his town when he gained a place at the local grammar but by the age of 14 he was being groomed and sexually abused by the catholic school's headmaster father kevin o'neill i was in direct jeopardy my future depended upon doing well at this school and graham also feared telling his parents as they were in awe of father o'neill and his position in the community mum and dad thought he was the pinnacle of everything that they wanted he was the guardian of my spiritual well-being and he was the gatekeeper of this new world that i'd been given access to they liked it absolutely been enchanted by it yeah [Music] there wasn't a language available in the 70s to talk about abuse so if no one talks about abuse how did you how did one talk about it so all you could do was close your eyes and go somewhere else that's what i did and life went on with kevin and we went to theaters and movie houses and restaurants just as we had before but this time i knew that there was an ending to this i knew there was a price to be paid and i would pay that price at the end of each of these outings graham felt isolated and totally unable to speak up about what was happening never even crossed my mind that i was able to tell anyone about it i was so locked down by the church the school my parents expectations of me it it would have been impossible to imagine a world in which i could tell anybody about this it was entirely you're entirely sealed in to this bubble this this dead and strange um dislocated sense of nowhereness where all there is is you and the secret but something finally changed for graham when he was 15 when father o'neal took him and two other boys on a school trip to greece he'd been running trips to greece for a while every year and taking two or three boys i'm not saying that he abused those boys i don't know but it was a pattern that had been established and this year one year um i was 15 he invited me to go with two other boys there was some agency that was given me in greece he was no longer a priest in greece he was no longer a teacher and being around these two other lads who were a couple of years older than me just gave me an opportunity to make these kind of boyhood alliances so i discovered that actually i didn't have to just be this disembodied puppet for this man it was during this trip that one night graham finally confronted his abuser i said i hate what you're doing i hate you i hate you i hate you over and over again and collapsed in a not very good state in a bedroom in a small hotel in crete and that was the end of the sexual abuse what was his reaction he said the word something like you're evil by the time rachel was 16 she had been getting abused by her teacher for three years he had left her with no self-confidence and suffering with anorexia but the confused teenager tried to carry on life as normal you know i was deeply in love with him but as time went by um because my other friends got boyfriends and somebody said well why don't you go and you know go out with to the cinema with him for a date or whatever so i sort of had took mini dates with other other guys and stuff and and and i really began to see what was what was happening between me and graeme was just really not normal i mean i was nowhere near telling anybody or thinking this was illegal or wrong i just wanted to get away as rachel's school days came to an end she knew it was finally a chance to escape from mr wilcock we had a final school assembly and we did that thing where we wrote environment each of the shirts you know sort of see you soon or whatever and i can remember he he sort of wrote on my shirt and just that sense of feeling that was the end somehow it was a great sort of visual metaphor for how i was feeling and i think i was i was relieved [Music] rachel gained 12 0 levels she went on to oxford university and embarked on a successful career as a broadcast journalist [Music] if you met me in my twenties you're going wow yeah right she's you know she's she's go getting she's got a great job she you know she goes to 20 night clubs in london she gets on the vip list she's you know all this kind of stuff um yeah and you and the person that you would have seen there's no way that you would have gone this is a person that's mentally falling apart there was always someone that was thinner than me there was always someone that was more beautiful than me there was always something you know it was just everything was just was just never enough [Music] the emotional impact of being groomed by a teacher is huge it is often the first interaction in a sexual way that teenagers had they may not understand what's going on when it's happening they may not understand that they are being abused and when they come out of that they suddenly have the realization of what happened to them and that can be really difficult to know that you were a victim of grooming to know that you were a victim of sexual assault by somebody that was there to look after you that can hit somebody hard and we see cases of people who have been abused in school that go on to have a lifetime of problems a lifetime of trauma that they only ever managed to really get over if they managed to get really good help it wasn't until 2009 during an online chat with old school friends that rachel finally came to terms with what had really happened to her somebody said what scream up to now um and i thought oh this will be interesting so some boy said or man said um oh he's working at an orphanage in romania and then suddenly another woman's popped up and and i can remember exactly the words she used she said it's like letting a kid loose in a candy store and i just thought what why is she saying that [Music] and so she told me about what had happened with her and graham which is her story to tell not mine but what she told me was horrific uh yeah and i ultimately utterly believed everything she told me i just thought i can't carry i can't carry this around anymore inside my head and i hated him because i thought you've done this to somebody else and you didn't only screw up my life you totally screwed up her life and you've probably screwed up quite a few other women's lives as well and i opened the minibar and i drank pretty much the entire contents of the minibar and at some point i went down into the lobby and bought i can't remember how many but they sell tyrannol in america which is like my group of friend or whatever and i took them back up to the room and i just thought i can't go on feeling like this anymore and um i swallowed a whole load of tablets [Music] and this probably sounds strange to a lot of people but my mom was thousands of miles away and she just said she knew that something was wrong and she phoned the reception of the hotel and said i know this sounds strange but i'm really worried about my daughter will you please just knock on the door and check that she's okay the next thing i remember was the ambulance guys arriving and kind of trying to ask me what i'd taken and what and i had to be honest don't really remember a massive amount i just remembered them taking me to hospital and i spent four days in intensive care and i can just remember thinking i don't want to die i really don't want to die and i can remember praying and saying god i don't want to die um and and and just thinking i'm gonna i'm not gonna let him take me down he's screwed up enough of my life and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna let you ruin the rest of it in australia after months of being groomed by her music teacher fourteen-year-old lisa turner had become besotted i believed that he totally loved me and i believed that i totally loved him i thought that what i was experiencing in this relationship i believed that's what love was she told her mum and dad about the relationship and though deeply concerned they felt powerless to do anything my parents were not happy about it but they chose the route that they chose because they thought it was the best thing you also have to remember is he groomed them emboldened her teacher now became increasingly controlling of lisa he started to get resentful and nasty whenever i was having fun and so i started to ask permission and i think that's you know that was like a key part of the the sort of slippery slope that i was i needed to ask him permission in order to go out with my with my school friends as a 14 year old girl the relationship continued until one day her teacher suddenly announced he was to leave australia thinking back uh i think part of the reason he left i think the school was starting to get suspicious and i think he was frightened that he was gonna you know it was totally illegal at that point i was 14 we were in a sexual relationship he was scared that he was either going to lose his job or go to prison or you know be arrested or both [Music] but once in the uk her teacher started phoning lisa's mom manipulating her into letting lisa join him one of the things he was saying to her that i had no idea about was that he was saying oh yeah well you know i'm really worried that lisa's going to run away and she's going to go to sydney and become a prostitute this is like a really horrible thing or a pretty bad thing faced with something really horrific or just bad you choose the just bad at the same time as manipulating her mum lisa's teacher was also emotionally blackmailing her the phone call started from england and it's like i'm so depressed you have to come i'm going to kill myself if you don't come if you don't come now it's going to be over forever and that's it and i'll never find anyone again like you and there's all this emotional blackmail and then i remember like this knot tightening in my stomach and it's like well i have to go i have to go so i nagged and nagged and nagged my mum incredibly lisa's teacher managed to get his way he persuaded my parents to allow me to go to england for and initially it's just a few weeks it's just going to be like six weeks and then i was going to go back home but she wouldn't see home again for a long time it was five years less a month that i was there graham caveney was abused by his head teacher father o'neill at grammar school but after standing up to him aged 15 on a school trip the abuse stopped he went on to sixth form and achieved good grades and ultimately left lancashire behind and went away to work university and i was off somewhere new somewhere in the west midlands and i wouldn't have to look at that part of my life ever again but father o'neill's cruelty had left its mark often we see with children who've been sexually abused that they will start to exhibit coping mechanisms they can be positive coca messen sometimes like throwing themselves into sporting activities but often they're negative so things like self-harm drinking something that they can take control of they can do that takes them away from the abuse takes them away from the the trauma that they're experiencing and what lay ahead for graham was years of alcoholism i was drinking two bottles of vodka a day i was unable to leave my house i just used to sit and drink until i fell asleep and then wake up and drink some more by 2009 graham had ended up in rehab when he came out he got a job in a book shop and began writing about his childhood experiences hello it was the saving of me and it gave me structure and it gave me a reason to stay sober it felt like a compulsion it was just coming out almost as though it was dictation graham did report father o'neill to the church in the early 90s but he was disappointed by the outcome they confronted him he admitted it and then said but it takes two to tango that was his his response i was 14 i didn't agree to tango with anyone [Music] do you think justice was done that's a good question for justice to be done there needs to be an acknowledgement by the perpetrators that a crime was committed and there wasn't that acknowledgement from the catholic church or indeed the school so no justice wasn't even close to being served in the uk lisa was now living with her music teacher but the relationship was physically and emotionally abusive he had me so under his control all he had to do was tell me to do something and i would do it i wasn't allowed to speak to anyone and he would shove me he would push me he would do sort of nasty things i could push my head against the wall and just hold it there i learned strategies that could probably neutralize this behavior so anytime i acted in a way that was grown up he would get really grumpy with me and anytime i acted in a way that was childlike i would get really rewarded and you know loved for it i would snuggle up on the sofa with a blankie and a cuddly toy and pretending to be sucking my thumb and you know like to be this child this infant because then i might not get raped that night although they spoke regularly back in australia her mum felt helpless to do anything she was devastated she was devastated do i wish she'd been stronger there was a time when i did there was a time when i thought i really wish she'd fought for me harder but uh i know that she did the best she could and i think she was in a really shitty place i think in her mind she thought she can like i'll leave her in england but i will keep the lines of communication open and after enduring nearly five years lisa finally did reach out to her mother and ask for her help i said you know mom i think i want to get out of this i think i want to leave him and there was no judgment there was no oh i told you so and oh but there was none of that she just said okay that's what you want what do you need and i said well i think i need some money to put a deposit down on a bed sit and she's like how much do you need and she just she just got me out when lisa told her teacher she was leaving he was furious he was just so vicious and i remember being like just in floods in the early days after i escaped i was very numb and i was very lost i did think about going to the police i did think about prosecuting once and i just thought you know what it's just not worth it i'd rather leave him to his demons and i will spend my time in love and joy rachel struggled throughout her twenties and thirties with the aftermath of being abused by her teacher graham wilcock but after attempting suicide she finally found the strength to report the abuse to the police i had to give very graphic video evidence to say exactly down to you know the graphic details of what happened which was understandably really hard and total credit to lancashire police that were brilliant they were absolutely brilliant graham was living in romania at the time but voluntarily came back to the uk for questioning i think he came back because he probably thought he'd get a wrap on the knuckles because that's what happened then and he could go back to romania but graham was charged with six counts of indecent assault and would face court for the misery he had caused when rachel was a child the day of the court case i i had a choice to go i didn't have to go because i didn't have to give evidence as such um but i decided i wanted to to see him because in all my nightmares dreams whatever you want to call them he was always the age that he was when he abused me so he was still 28 and i was still 13. i just wanted him to see an adult woman who was no longer being controlled by him the weird thing was that i was standing with my mom and i remember she said oh he's down there and i didn't recognize him and the only reason that i recognized him was because he used to bite his nails really badly and it looks and i saw this guy sitting there fighting himself and i thought oh my goodness that's him and he'd like aged a lifetime he just looked like a really sad middle-aged man and all that power and control that he'd had over me for all those years just left and i just thought you sad pathetic human being and it was just such a freeing moment for me because i just thought that has gone your control over me has gone graham pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent assault and after hearing all the evidence the judge sentenced him to the maximum four years in prison the reason that he had given the maximum sentence he was allowed to give him was because i was a young girl whose father had died and he was in a position of trust and he had utterly and totally abused that position of trust rachel put the past behind her she's now married has a son and is making new family memories this is from my son this christmas he calls me mama so it's mama because he gets his good northern words from me the past never leaves you but i've been able to stop believing the lies that he told me about myself and to absolutely be able to stand and say i am a survivor not a victim there are so many people men and women who have been raped or sexually abused who aren't here to tell their story anymore because they did commit suicide and they did die and so if you are here and you are still alive however hard life is you are a survivor and that makes you a pretty special person

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 1,594,767

Keywords: Real Stories, Real Stories Full Documentary, Real Stories Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, full documentary, full episode, amazing stories, crime documentary, true crime, abuse documentary, teach abuse, abuse survi, abuse survivor, child grooming documentary, grooming documentary, teacher grooming, teacher student

Id: HiGsHc0s4u4

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020