'I wish someone had told me the relationship with my teacher was not my fault'

Sophie has always cursed the teacher who seduced then abused her when she was a schoolgirl. But she did not realise he had done anything potentially illegal until she read about the case of 15-year-old Megan Stammers, who was found and taken into protective care on Friday after fleeing to France with her married maths teacher, who was arrested. Now Sophie is contemplating calling the police. In Sophie's case, the teacher is still teaching teenage girls at a prestigious private school a few miles from her house. She, on the other hand, struggles every day to cope with the effects his violence and oppression had on her teenage self.

"He ruined me, sexually, emotionally and in every other way possible," she says. "I was naive and innocent, and he was perverse. The sex was aggressive and sickening, but I was infatuated: he was this older man. All the girls fancied him. I'll be honest: we were all after him.
"He told me he was in love with me, but then he crushed me until I was a complete emotional wreck. He was obsessively possessive and I was completely under his thumb. I had been this bubbly, strong and independent teenager. He destroyed me."
When Sophie first saw the reports about Stammers and her 30-year-old teacher, Jeremy Forrest, it brought back strong feelings. Then, to her surprise, she felt relief. "I have realised, for the first time, that my teacher was a sexual predator," she says. "In one way, it makes me feel less mad for having suffered so much over something that happened so long ago, and for not having been able to get my life back together since.
"But," she adds, "it can't heal me or change the consequences. Most of my relationships since then have been really awful and violent. I can't trust men in positions of authority. I was predicted four A-grades at A-level and had great plans for university. But I dropped out of education and have never come to anything. It all started with him. If he had not done what he did to me when I was too young to know what was going on, my life now would be very different."
The teacher was 25 when he seduced Sophie, a 17-year-old student, in 1992. He was her form tutor. The relationship was intense: her parents knew about it and she frequently stayed at his house. But they had to keep it a secret in school. "We'd ignore each other during the day," says Sophie. He dumped her nine days before her A-levels – and then invigilated at her exams. Sophie didn't achieve anything like the grades she had been predicted but still got into university.
Then he rekindled the relationship. When it ended a second time, she fell apart, dropping out of university and into a life of chaos and self-destruction. "He broke me," she says. "But now I've read that he did do something genuinely wrong in the eyes of the law. All these years later, he still deserves to be punished for what he did, doesn't he? Is it my responsibility to try to protect the girls at the school he's now teaching at?"
Sophie, however, will not be able to see her abuser prosecuted for what he did. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 made it an offence for a person over 18 in a position of trust to have a sexual relationship with a child under 18, regardless of whether the relationship is consensual and even if the person does not teach the child. Prior to that act, the age of consent – 16 – was the only issue.
Teaching unions claim pupil-teacher affairs are "very rare". Between 1991 and 2008, 129 teachers were prosecuted for relationships with pupils, according to reports. But a 2007 YouGov survey of 2,200 adults said one in six knew of someone who had had an "intimate relationship" with a teacher while at school.
One school has dealt with no fewer than five incidents. When, in 2009, Christopher Reen, 31, a classroom supervisor at Headlands school in Bridlington, was jailed for three years and four months after admitting six counts of sexual activity with a 15-year-old female pupil, it emerged that four former staff at the same school had faced the courts in recent years over inappropriate sexual conduct.
Hollie was raped and exploited by her teacher. There has never been a prosecution. She has, however, fought for years to get him struck off the teachers' register – something she finally achieved in August this year. "Three years ago I started trying to put right something that happened between 1999 and 2001, while I was a pupil at a school in remote Scotland," she says. "Between the ages of 15 and 17, I was groomed – though there wasn't a word for it then – and entered into a relationship with my 40-year-old male religious studies teacher. The relationship became nasty, violent, obsessive and physically and sexually abusive."
Hollie's parents eventually found out about the relationship. It took just one conversation for them to make her realise she had been manipulated and abused. "We reported him to the police, the school, the education department, the council and the General Teaching Council for Scotland," says Hollie. "They all received a full report from me detailing the extent of what had happened. I moved to England where I was originally from. No one from these organisations contacted me. I was a mess and couldn't go through with prosecution, but I always stuck to my story. They all knew what the allegations were, but none of them did anything to investigate. Everything was brushed under the carpet. The teacher moved and continued teaching in a different part of Scotland."
Hollie had a complete breakdown. "I literally believed I was worthless," she said. "I got into some not particularly healthy relationships and had problems with alcohol and self-harm."
Three years ago, Hollie found the courage to address what had happened. The police investigated for more than a year and ultimately charged the teacher with, she thinks, rape and assault. "But they were unable to prosecute because of Scotland's laws about corroboratory evidence and the accused's right to silence," says Hollie. "The teacher sat through a six-hour interview, replying 'No comment' to every question."
The legal case was also complicated because although it is now illegal for a teacher to have a relationship with a pupil, their relationship began eight weeks before the date this law came into effect. "So they couldn't prosecute him for that," she says. Nevertheless, the teacher was suspended by the council in April 2010 and finally struck off the teaching register last month. "He has been put on to the list of those barred from working with children as a result of my evidence and the police investigation," says Hollie.
"It hurts more, the older I get," she says. "The closer I get to the age he was, the more I realise how awful it was, what he did. I see how he manipulated my 15-year-old self and I realise how someone of my age would know, absolutely, that it was completely wrong and inappropriate to get into a relationship with someone of that age.
"I wish that someone had told me, when I was 15, that if the teacher in question really loved me, he would never act on it. And I wish someone had told me that it was never, ever my fault."
Professor Pat Sikes of the University of Sheffield has studied pupil and teacher relationships, and challenges the notion that girls are necessarily powerless or exploited in them, pointing out that a significant proportion end up marrying or living together in an enduring and solid relationship.
She should know: Sikes first fell in love with her husband when she was 14 and he was her 22-year-old teacher. Their sexual relationship, however, did not begin until he left the school when she was 16. While stressing that girls need to be protected against predatory male teachers, her study concludes that this should not be "through blanket laws that have the effect of making all women into weak, potential victims".
Others describe relationships with teachers that were on the cusp of inappropriate and caused parents and other teachers concern – but were ultimately a positive experience.
Sapphire had an intense, albeit non-sexual, relationship with her maths teacher between the ages of 13 and 18. "I don't tell people about our relationship because, looked at through the eyes of someone who wasn't there, it sounds like a clear-cut case of, at best, weirdness and at worst, manipulation and near-abuse," she says. "In fact, that wasn't the case at all."
Sapphire's relationship with her teacher grew during their one-to-one, after-school classes. "I was weak in maths and he took it upon himself to teach me so well that I went on to study it at A-level," she says. "After those lessons, we would talk about all sorts of intellectual and creative things. From him, I learned that the opposite sex could be gentle, empathetic, clever, interesting and interested. I never had the slightest interest in boys of my own age because, by comparison, they were sexually crass, emotionally unreliable and intellectually dull. To this day, I'm grateful for that."
As Sapphire got older, however, the teacher became more intense. He prevented her leaving his class when her grades improved enough to move into a higher set, insisting that he would tutor her himself to pass the exams. "I began to find it all a bit overwhelming, and backed off," she remembers. "There was a parents' evening around then and my dad picked up on the atmosphere between us. He joked about it afterwards, saying it was like we'd had a lover's tiff. I think my parents were a bit confused by it all. They knew nothing explicitly wrong was going on and so they didn't quite know what do to about it."
Soon afterwards, however, Sapphire's mother insisted she move to a different class. "There were rumours in the staffroom about us and my teacher was warned to back off," she says. "He did as he was told, but I missed him. He was a really important part of my life." She started going back to his classroom after school once a week. "We just talked," she says. As she neared 18, however, the relationship shifted. She began to grow away from him and he became neurotic and, she says, "slightly stalkerish".
"I got the impression that things were nearing a climax. I had the definite feeling that he was expecting something to happen after so many years of what I began to suspect was what he thought of as having 'waited'. I found the thought of him waiting really creepy and realised I had potentially got into something I hadn't genuinely understood," she says.
He sent Sapphire 18 red roses on her birthday and appeared at her class's leaving party. "My friends formed a protective ring around me and every time he came near, they spirited me away," she says. She left school and never saw him again. Two decades on, she feels fondness and sadness for him. "I think he was a vulnerable man," she said. "I vaguely worry that he remembers our relationship with pain. I hope he doesn't."
Katherine has even fonder memories of her relationship with a teacher. She was 15 when Tom came to teach at her girls' school. She moved to a sixth-form college at 16. A week later, Tom asked her out on a date. "There weren't many male teachers at our school so we were all very aware of this 23-year-old new staff member," says Katherine. "He never taught me, but all my friends fancied him. I wasn't particuarly taken by him until we went for that drink."
Two years after their first date, they were married. They had two children and the marriage lasted for 30 years, until 2002, when Tom died.
Katherine says laws that prevent teachers and pupils having relationships are correct. "He must have been noticing me when I was still a pupil at his school, but we occasionally said to each other how lucky it was that he was no longer my teacher," she says. "Had I stayed at that school, nothing would ever have happened between us because that would have been completely wrong."
Some of the teachers at her old school, however, continued to disapprove of the relationship, refusing to go to their wedding. "Their reaction was a complete surprise to me and meant nothing. I wasn't dazzled by Tom. I suppose I was flattered at first, because he was a teacher and an older man – but only for that first date," she says.
"Our relationship was completely normal. Completely ordinary."
Some names have been changed.