“Your son is very brave,” I said. “He put a monster behind bars.”
The Archivist smiled ruefully.
“You know, Ben didn’t want that. He just wanted to get Rex fired, that’s what he said. He wanted it to stop. It was after that Durban tour that Ben decided that he needed to do something about it. I think it was either the first or second game they played, after returning from that tour, that Ben decided. Apparently, Rex was busy with a couple of boys at the back of the bus, where he was doing stupid things, grabbing them and their genitals and stuff, and Ben obviously heard what was going on. So when they all got off the bus, he saw that Rex was going to the common area with a few boys, and Ben knew what usually happened there and that he would be able to get footage, because a camera had been installed there. He wasn’t there when it actually happened; I’d actually fetched him that day, but in his mind he was busy dealing with it. He thought of a way to do it … to report the waterpolo caps missing. They weren’t actually missing – he knew where they were. So I think that was his thought process; he would report the caps missing and then the Bosserts would watch the footage of what was going on between Rex and the boys in that common area.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
Ben took the footage to the matron and her husband. He made a loud noise to draw their attention to the part where Rex was molesting a boy. And Rex was arrested. Parents of victim boys were called. But not all of them were on board to take any action.
“Were there repercussions afterwards?”
“We had numerous meetings with parents. The parents would sit and debate whether or not they should continue, because they were concerned about dragging their kids through this. My point of view was: actually, it’s quite simple, right now your kid might not be going through what he needs to go through, but I’d rather be in a position 10 years from now, having my son know that I’ve done everything I possibly could to fight for him, as opposed to my son realising that I didn’t do anything to fight for him, when I had the opportunity. So I tried desperately to get parents to back their kids on everything, but there were those parents who pulled out. Like the one kid who had filmed the footage – his parents said, ‘Don’t get involved.’ He’d actually put together a statement of stuff that had happened to him but he had to withdraw. So he was a victim, but they completely pulled him out. Then several other victims withdrew from the whole process.”
I wondered what the long-term impact of that would be. The Archivist read my mind.
“What could come back to bite them is when they start to resent their parents for not having acted. But the good thing about their recovery is that the success of the case will give them some sort of relief to know that it was wrong and that Rex has been punished. But the long and the short of it, though, is that the school, I feel, is responsible not for what he did, but for creating an environment where this behaviour was possible. And that’s what needs to change.”
“So already Ben was up against something he probably didn’t expect,” I said, “because you’d think parents would want the man who molested their kids to go to jail for a long time. I would. And for every child who testified, that could mean another year.”
The Archivist nodded.
“I believe Rex was arrested on 3 November and after that all the kids involved had to write a statement. There was a meeting at the school with the kids, parents, teachers and people on the committee. But the kids weren’t speaking, because they were mostly younger, mostly in Grade 8. They were denying that anything had happened. They said, ‘No, no, nothing happened, nothing.’ So Ben asked the adults, the parents and teachers to leave the room so he could encourage the kids to open up about what had happened to them.
“They all left the room but stood outside listening at the window. Ben started talking to the boys; he said, ‘Okay, this has happened to me,’ and he started explaining what had happened to him. And then he started pointing at certain boys and said, ‘I know this happened to you, I know this happened to you, I know this happened to you.’ And he started going through everybody and he said, ‘We have to do something about this.’ So he basically got all of them to start talking. Once they – I think, because they were mostly younger than him – once they saw this whole respect thing and that one of their older brothers was making a stand, they started to open up more about it.”
“That’s incredible,” I said. I meant it.
The Archivist sighed.
“Problem is that they got the boys into some kind of group therapy with a so-called counsellor or therapist, and she told them stuff that I don’t think was told to them the right way. The advice that she gave was quite simply that, ‘you deserve respect and if you don’t get it, you should fight for it,’ – which was stupid advice because it wasn’t delivered properly.
“Soon afterwards we started having a very hard time with Ben. Any sort of confrontation, any sort of disagreement, or when he felt that he was being treated badly, turned into ‘But why don’t you respect me?’ I said, ‘But, Ben, you need to respect us – we’re your parents, my boy.’ And he would say, ‘Ja, but you need to respect me.’
“Ben was a tough kid; he was strong, he was not scared – he could take you on physically. And I think his aggression and his spiral could have been prevented if [the therapist] wasn’t around. It certainly put Ben in a bad space. As a result, because his brotherhood was important to him, he started fighting for everyone because he felt that they couldn’t fight for themselves.
“In class once there were three boys who were told to stand because they were sitting in the wrong place, and the teacher basically told them to stand for the whole lesson. The boys were black students. Ben lost his shit and actually confronted the teacher and gave him a lecture; he said that the teacher was at fault because he had moved one of the desks in the class and that had made it unclear as to where they were meant to be sitting. The teacher reported Ben’s outburst to the grade head and later returned to the class. The lesson ended and Ben went to speak to the teacher; he was still adamant that the teacher was at fault. The teacher started pushing Ben and Ben told him not to touch him. The teacher pushed him again and Ben reacted instinctively and threw him onto a table … Obviously, that didn’t turn out well. The teacher reported him again. I had a meeting with Mr Derek Bradley, the principal at the time, and I said that Ben had been standing up for his brothers, and that I had felt that it may have been a race issue, and Ben had dealt with it. I said to the principal that I tried to explain to Ben that this could have been dealt with very differently, and that he should have taken his concerns to the principal or asked me to take this to the principal. Eventually that teacher apologised to Ben for his actions and Ben apologised to him, and there were no further repercussions. But it did form part of future encounters when that incident was brought up and people would say, ‘Ben’s got no respect.’ that kind of thing.”
Ben’s mother had come into the room during our conversation.
“We didn’t know everything that had happened to him at that point, so it was quite difficult because we had to get him to write down dates and details: when it started, which camps, trying to get everything in order. He sat with my husband for a long time writing that out. We didn’t know, for example, all of what had happened from Grade 8. And the more he told us, the more things we found out. And it just got worse and worse. His anger every weekend just got worse and worse. His friendships almost immediately changed; he started hanging out with the wrong boys – well, some of them anyway. When he exposed Rex, a lot of kids turned against him, many of whom were his peers, in the sense that they were the waterpolo players and rugby players; he lost friendships with a lot of the boys, because he had been the source of the information. So he became the scapegoat and the snitch. And they have this thing at Parktown: ‘You snitch, you die’ and ‘Snitches get stitches’.”
The Archivist joined in.
“The problem is that Ben’s fairly honest – even