Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer

3 reviews

eliran's review against another edition

informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Sexual assault, and Abandonment

Moderate: Fatphobia and Self harm

Minor: Death, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Car accident, and Gaslighting

knkoch's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative slow-paced

4.25

It's been a little while now since I finished this, but it keeps cropping up in my conversations. I had no idea before reading an article about this book's release that Charles Spencer was a historian; I merely recognized him as Princess Diana's brother. I was impressed by his writing style and they way he handled this sensitive, emotional material. He blended his own experience deftly with a considerable amount of research and a great breadth of interviews he conducted with peers and alumni from Maidwell school. This never felt like it was solely Spencer's story, but rather a consolidation of voices of several generations of men still suffering in various ways from the harm inflicted on them decades ago as children. (He decides early on to focus only on all-male boarding schools, which seems fair as far as scope seeing as that was his direct experience.)

Spencer really picked at a delicate paradox here, both acknowledging he and his peers' considerable class privilege and marveling at the entrenched English tradition of severe boarding school education, perhaps meant to "harden" those privileged children. The very families that could afford to educate their children any way they wished often chose to send them into the hands of 'educators' and staff they knew virtually nothing about, a situation primed for appalling abuse and subsequent cover-ups. Spencer tells his own story quite honestly, providing an account of his childhood understanding of events leavened with his now-adult perspective, which took many years and considerable therapy to reach. He's quite vulnerable throughout this account, without ever seeming self-pitying or arrogant. Though he does eviscerate the adults who failed him and his peers: staff, both teachers and administration, both abusers and knowing bystanders, all of whom could have tried to intervene. That seemed quite fair on his part. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Sexual assault, and Toxic relationship

Moderate: Bullying

ilikemandos's review

dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

I think it would be in poor taste to give this recollection a star rating. I will only say that if you want to learn about the dynamics which lead to the abuse of minors and their sadly common silence, this is a good resource. Parents/guardians/educators/etc may also have a particular interest in what Charles Spencer tells us.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Toxic relationship, Violence, Excrement, Vomit, Grief, Religious bigotry, Gaslighting, Abandonment, and Sexual harassment