Chosen

Channel 4

6 Nov

In December 2013 Peter Wright was convicted of 12 offences against children committed at Caldicott while he was head teacher. He and Hugh Henry, who pleaded guilty to abusing Mark Payge and others, were due to be sentenced in Feb 2014, but Hugh Henry was killed by a train in Amersham the day before sentencing was due to take place.

Peter Wright was sentenced to 8 years.

In 2003, Martin Carson admitted the buggery and indecent assault of two Caldicott pupils. And last year John Addrison, pleaded guilty to 13 charges of sexually abusing two boys at the school and four at another prep school and was sentenced to five years. Keith Geddes, charged with five sexual offences against four Caldicott boys, was acquitted this year after a retrial.

All the trials since 2008 have been as a result of new victims coming forward to police after seeing the film.

You can watch the film in its entirety below. Click on the Full Screen icon, bottom right of the frame below to watch fullscreen.

This film was made independently, supported generously by True Vision Productions and the BRITDOC Foundation. If you do watch the film, please support our work and make a donation by clicking on one of the buttons below. (Paypal asks for an address, but there is no need to give your own, if you prefer not to).

Tom, Mark and Alastair all went to the very best school money could buy. At eight years of age they were sent as boarders to a prep school in the countryside outside London that prepared boys for Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge and life.
What their parents didn’t suspect, was that several of the teachers on the staff were career paedophiles, who would ruthlessly use the position of power and influence they held in the lives of the children in their charge to sexually exploit them in the most extreme and degrading way.
For thirty years the boys, and the men they became, stayed silent, nursingthe dark secret of the abuse they suffered.
In this film they break that silence with spellbinding articulacy, and breath-taking honesty. Looking back over the decades they analyse the consummateskill with which their abusers groomed them – separating them from their parents’ affections, and ensuring that they had no choice but to become complicit in the terrible acts they were led to believe they had to commit.