A recent article in The Canberra Times reported that the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found 63 claims of child sexual abuse at Marist College in Canberra. The number of unreported cases is thought to much higher. This is the largest number of claims for a Catholic school in the Royal Commission’s report.

The article quotes the current principal of the college, Richard Sidorko, who writes, “I do not understand how a school with Marist’s values and ethos could not protect the victims.”

Richard. We’ve never met. I cannot imagine the difficulty of trying to lead a school community that is faced with Marist College’s history of abuse. You say you are horrified and I believe you. I hope you will extend me the same goodwill.

My name is John Horan. I was a student at Marist College Canberra from 1997 to 2000 and I think I can help you reconcile Marist’s values with its history.

I can only write about the values I learned when I was a pupil, four years after Brother Kostka was finally removed from the school after a long career molesting boys. Obviously, that was some time ago and much may have changed since then.

Perhaps your perceived conflict between Marist’s values and its abominable record of enabling child sexual abuse arises from a misunderstanding of the school’s values. As a former student it is no surprise that Marist College harboured a sexual predator. I wonder if you have mistaken the values the school put on its late ‘90s newsletters with the actual values it walked and talked and breathed in classrooms and corridors each day.

To understand Marist’s culture at that time, you have to understand its corridors. Each day between classes over a thousand boys would surge through the halls to move from room to room. And each of those migrations was an occasion for abuse.

Maybe you’d get shoved. Maybe you’d get called a racist or homophobic slur. Or you’d hear sexualised comments about your family. Or be touched inappropriately, or punched, or tripped.

To varying degrees, it happened to everyone. In the Marist hierarchy, casual violence flowed ever downwards. Just a trickle at the top, gaining momentum as it went down, and pooling at the bottom. Looking back, the most astonishing part of this thuggery was its banality. It bore little connection to conflicts or grudges. It was just the currency of the school’s social economy.

The boys on the lowest social rung could expect to be abused every time they walked down a corridor. Every lunchtime, every recess. In a typical schedule that was four times a day. Plus whatever happened during classes, and God help you if you caught the bus.

Everyone knew the names of the boys at the bottom of the heap. Everyone knew the rumours about them (that they were gay, that they had been caught masturbating in the toilets, etc.). Everyone knew those rumours were false. Everyone knew the special jokes that you could make at their expense. Everyone knew who you could pick on without repercussions.

And yet the teachers did nothing. I’m sure they would plead ignorance. Every one of the roughly 1500 boys on campus could identify multiple students who encountered bullying and harassment several times a day, but the staff knew nothing. Not a single staff member had even the faintest whiff of suspicion. Certainly not enough to investigate further, or perhaps take action. What a remarkable coincidence that ignorance should correspond so closely with the burdens of responsibility.

Of course they turned a blind eye. It is an insult to anyone’s intelligence to suggest otherwise. And yes, there were rules. There was always some kind of impending punishment. I remember a very stern lecture on the new “bully book”.

“Get written up three times?” the teacher said. “That’s goodbye. You’re expelled.”

There was even a drawing on the projector screen of a boy being driven away from the school. It was rule-making as performance, with no intention of enforcement.

Every day, boys at Marist were abused and the organisation chose to ignore it. Punching down and turning a blind eye. Those were Marist’s values.

Now, you might say “But this was just some horseplay in the corridors! They would have acted if it had been something serious.”

This is a comforting self-deception.

First, Richard, I want you to take a moment to imagine what it’s like to be a boy at the bottom of the heap. Imagine what it’s like to be the butt of a school-wide running joke. The subject of a special rumour they whisper about you when you walk past. Perhaps it becomes a shove if you look them in the eye. Maybe on the oval someone punches your friend, knocks your lunch onto the ground, or spits on you. Four times a day. Every day. For years. Imagine what it’s like to dread each gap between classes. To put your head down on the bus and wait for it to end.

I still need to take moments like this. To remind myself that this was wrong. Because at the time this all seemed quite normal. Even now I want to look back and say “it wasn’t such a big deal”, or “everyone gets picked on at high school”. Part of me is desperate to reassure you that I wasn’t at the bottom. That I wasn’t one of those boys. The normalisation of violence and sense of shame for victims at Marist was so strong that half a lifetime after leaving, my first instinct is to insist that the bullying didn’t affect me. That I was never a real target, that I was tough enough. That I didn’t contribute to a culture that made other kids lives a misery.

No one deserves to be treated like this. Outside the bizarre bubble of private boys’ schools, violence like this is condemned. Imagine if someone spread blatantly false sexualised rumours in a workplace, or shoved people in a shopping centre. When this kind of racist or homophobic abuse happens on a train, the video gets hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and charges are laid. This isn’t boyish exuberance. It is abuse. The victims did not forfeit their rights to basic decency and respect when they knotted their ties in the morning.

And second, are we really expected to trust this reassurance? That after years of inaction, when the abuse changes from “merely” verbal and physical to sexual, something will be done? What reason does the community have for confidence? Leaving aside the 17 years of abuse that render this claim utterly false, the only track record the school could hold up in my time was one of consistently knowing exactly what was convenient and nothing more. The community entrusted Marist College with the education and stewardship of generations of young men. A baseline of wilful ignorance simply isn’t good enough.

My friends had brothers who were at the school when boys were being abused. They knew. Everybody knew. You didn’t want to be one of Brother Kostka’s special boys. You didn’t want to get too involved in the film or chess clubs. Except the school leadership, of course. They had no idea. Claims were made and quietly investigated. It must have been much easier to sleep at night having determined that those claims were false. But they weren’t.

The values and culture that enabled sexual abuse were thriving when I was at Marist College. The blind eye Marist’s leadership turned to bullying was the same blind eye they had previously turned to sexual abuse. Looking back, I suspect that the reason I never heard about boys being molested between 1997 and 2000 wasn’t that robust protections were in place, but rather that no one on the staff was inclined to abuse them.

I wonder, Richard, if you and I walked the corridors of your school together, whether we’d see the same pointless thuggery. The sick foundation of a culture that failed so many young men. But of course, we wouldn’t see it. It would stop at the slightest murmur of our arrival.

The real question is what you would do next. Would you return to your office, comfortably convinced that your flock was well tended? Or would you look more closely? What kind of example would you set for your staff? How would you respond to the knot of kids avoiding your gaze with one uncomfortable-looking boy at its centre?

And if you found bullying, would you hand out a few detentions and consider the job done? Our values flourished in the soil of those punishments. No one ever changed a culture with a stirring assembly speech and a room full of bad apples waiting after the bell on Friday afternoon. Have you chosen a different way?

I hope that in 2017 one of Marist’s values is honesty. And I hope that you can look at your school and honestly say that you are protecting its pupils. I hope that you have created a culture which is held together with decency and respect. Where no one is vulnerable to abuse, be it verbal, physical, or sexual. I hope that your inability to understand the actions of your predecessors comes as the result of massive cultural change, rather than wilful ignorance. Cultural change is hard and slow. It is a lot to hope for. Good luck.