“The next day Mr Bradley came to our house with Collan Rex’s girlfriend [also a teacher at the school]. She wanted to see the footage … She had also been Collan Rex’s teacher when he was in Grade 9, so she was a few years older than him. Mr Bradley said she needed to see the footage to have closure because she loved this man and she couldn’t move on. Chris and I had a huge problem with this request because we felt it was not right to show her the footage. So I asked the Foundation administrator to phone their lawyers to get a legal opinion. We agreed to show her the beginning, before the boys got undressed, where Collan was only rubbing the boy’s leg, and trying to kiss the boy. She immediately burst into tears. She shook her head and said, ‘This is what he used to do to me.’ The administrator arrived and told us we are not allowed to show her the footage and we stopped immediately. She told us she was done with Collan and if I would please phone his family to collect his stuff in boarding. She gave me his uncle’s number.
“The next day whilst the boys had a counselling session, they saw this teacher, Collan’s ex, standing in the door listening to them. The boys were very upset and very scared that she would tell Collan who the boys were and what they had said. She landed up doing exactly that. She went to visit Rex and she told him who the boys were. She later admitted this to my husband and I and Mr Bradley. She told us it was really hard for her to just walk away as she was feeling sorry for Rex. I was very upset that she had listened to the boys’ conversations with the psychologist. I reported this to Mr Bradley again. I told him the boys were terrified. Some of them said they did not want to be taught by her any more.
“The next day, Janet, the psychologist was sitting at our house, waiting to get a room to counsel the boys, when Mr Bradley brought Collan’s girlfriend to our house. She was not on a medical aid and Mr Bradley suggested that because the school was paying for the boys’ counselling sessions, they should also pay for her as she was also a victim of Rex. Mr Bradley called Chris and me to one side and told us Janet would also be seeing her. I objected, saying that surely this would be a conflict of interest. We stopped it immediately. But whilst Mr Bradley was talking to us, Collan’s girlfriend asked Janet what the boys had said Rex had done to them. And Janet started telling her. I was furious. I told Mr Bradley, ‘This is not right.’ When the girlfriend left I confronted Janet. She admitted to me that she felt she had been put in a corner. She also said she really needed the work and money from the school.
“Janet subsequently gave the boys her cell number and said they could call her any time if they needed her. The boys then started sending her messages like, ‘Mam, I can’t sleep,’ and they would add little emojis. When Janet received a message with a heart emoji one night, she was at her boyfriend’s house and he did not like it at all. The next day she called me to tell me she needed to speak to me urgently. I saw the boys earlier that morning before I met with her and they told me of the extreme foul language Janet was using in their sessions. I was very concerned. Later that morning Janet told me she thought one of the victim boys was in love with her as he was sending her messages late at night with emojis. I then knew something really big was wrong. I asked one of the moms, who was very high up in the medical field, to check Janet’s qualifications. Just to find out whether she had ever been taken off the psychologists’ roll for unprofessional behaviour, like confidentiality. This was indeed the case.
“Mr Bradley asked myself and Michelle Hobkirk to go with him to the school’s lawyers regarding the case and to get advice going forward. When we sat down with the lawyers, they said that we could make this all go away by the end of the day. Michelle and I were both shocked and asked them to explain. They asked us to leave the room because they wanted to speak to Mr Bradley alone. After the meeting I told Mr Bradley we couldn’t just ‘make this all go away’, as some boys had been raped, abused, and that this was serious.
“Mr Bradley agreed. But then he dropped a bombshell and told us that he had just resigned. We told him we were very concerned as only the boarding parents had been notified about the abuse and not the day parents. He said he wanted to keep it as quiet as possible and we needed to put something together going forward. We were building a R27-million boarding house and he did not want this to come out and give the school a bad name. This really angered me and I decided to get advice from my sister-in-law, who was a magistrate in the children’s court.
“In the meantime, the victim boys who had come forward were very scared, ashamed and sad, because by then everyone knew who they were. They were embarrassed to face the other boys or go to prep. They would sit and do their homework at my house and cried almost every night. They felt like outsiders, crying till the early hours of the morning. They were teased beyond imagination. They were called ‘gay’ and ‘liars’ – not only by their mates and other students, but also by some of the teachers. One of the female teachers told a boy who was sucking his pen, ‘Collan taught you well to do oral sex.’ They were called snitches, they were accused of messing up the school’s name and how they must have liked what Collan did to them, because they did not report it when it happened, how they had asked for it and enjoyed it. These boys were damaged and heartbroken.
“Then an appointment was made for us at the Johannesburg Parent and Child Parenting Centre to meet up with Luke Lamprecht and Rolene Milne, who have done a lot of work with abused children, and for the first time it felt like we could get the boys professional help, which was already late, months after Collan had been arrested. We were told the boys were supposed to have each gotten their own psychologist, right from the start and that it should have been someone who had testified in High Court before. Rolene Milne then started getting the correct psychologist for each boy. Mr Bradley, who had not left the school yet, had a meeting with the parents, where he assured them that the school would pick up the bill for the psychologists and their meds. The boarders would also be taken to their psychologists from boarding. For one and a half years, I drove the victim boys from boarding to and from psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and hospitals. I had to manage every single boy’s appointments and make sure they attended. It finally became too much for me, as more and more boys started coming forward about the abuse. By this stage, 23 boys had opened up.
“I myself started going on meds; it felt like I was having a breakdown of sorts, but I had to be strong for the boys. After all, they were the real victims. Not just of Rex, but of a whole system of intimidation and brutality that was part of the school’s tradition and culture.
“This whole ordeal really had an impact on my family life. I now understand why initiation had been taking place for so many years because, before we fixed things up, the boys had nothing to do at night to keep them busy. Just sit in the filthy rat-infested boarding house, where the matrics who were boarders had free range to abuse and initiate these young boys in any way they wanted. It was considered to be great fun for matrics to beat up boys who had to run for their lives, whilst being blindfolded as they were hit with socks, filled with golf balls and potatoes. The younger boys were put in a cupboard or locked in the locker, which was carried down to the showers, the taps were opened and when the locker filled up with water, and the boy felt like he was drowning, that ‘made him a man’. Grade 8 boys were sometimes forced to stand naked at prep and then have their private parts compared and made fun of, with boys gathered around, laughing at a boy’s penis size. One of the heads of boarding also facilitated a ‘turn-around day’ – or changeover day – in boarding when the Grade 8s and matric boys swapped for a day: the Grade 8 boys now had all the privileges of a matric and the matrics had to do what the Grade 8s told them to do. [At the end of the day] the head of boarding would then blow a whistle [signalling that changeover day would be over] and the matrics were then allowed to beat the Grade 8 boys. One boy slept in a tree the entire night because he was that scared of getting beaten up by the matrics.
“The Grade 8s sometimes had to stand on their knees while matrics played face tennis by hitting them hard through the face. They had to stand at the stairwell, where matrics would kick them down the stairs. A cupboard door made of solid wood was broken on one of the Grade 8 boy’s head. This same boy was made to lie in a ditch of sewerage for an entire night. The boy was peed on by the matrics, while he was sleeping on the top bunk bed. Some Grade 8 boys had to put their old pots’ underpants on and were told to