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Will Young worried he was too privileged to talk about abuse at boarding schoolRachael O'ConnorEntertainment – Metro
He said this way of thinking was tied into a ‘sense of shame’.
Will Young says he wants to do a documentary on the institution of boarding schools after previously worrying he was too ‘privileged’ (Picture: WireImage)
Will Young says he used to worry he was ‘too privileged’ to speak about his abuse at boarding school.
The Leave Right Now singer went to a private prep school as a child and young teenager, where he says sexual and physical abuse was rife.
Teachers, he said, would be drunk, violent and abusive, and ripped phones out of the wall so scared children couldn’t call their parents or contact Childline.
Will and his twin brother, Rupert, went to the preparatory boarding school for several years, and Will was later diagnosed with PTSD over the abuse he had lived through.
Tragically, Rupert died by suicide in 2020 after struggling with depression and addiction for years.
Earlier this month, Will appeared in Channel 4 Documentary Will Young: Losing My Twin Rupert, where he opened up on some of the most difficult moments of his and Rupert’s lives.
Now, in an interview with I News, Will revealed he wants his next documentary to be about the institution of boarding schools.
Will previously opened up in the most difficult ways in a documentary about his twin Rupert, who died by suicide in 2020 (Picture: Channel 4)
However, he admits, for a long time he thought he shouldn’t be the one to make that documentary as boarding schools are ‘linked to privilege.’
He told the outlet: ‘For years, I thought, “Well, I can’t talk about it and make a documentary, because it’s all linked to privilege, but now I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
‘The idea that you can’t talk about it because you were lucky to be at a prep school just tied into this sense of shame,’ he went on.
‘I want to look at why there isn’t really any public recognition of what kind of places they were. I think my prep school made a huge mistake when they wouldn’t privately apologise to me, because that’s all I wanted.’
Singer Will worried about the ‘privileged’ link to boarding schools (Picture: Redferns)
The star had previously admitted in a recent interview with Times Radio that ‘ironically,’ he felt ‘very fortunate’ to be sent to the private school.
His parents ‘didn’t have a lot of money,’ and the school would constantly remind him how hard his parents were working to send him there, a type of messaging Will points out ‘often happens when people are in abusive situations.’
Now, reflecting on his time at the school and one particular friend he made, Will said he is ‘proud we survived’.
‘I made some amazing, astonishing friendships, it was like we were in an awful club together, because it was dreadful what we experienced,’ he said.
Will and Rupert both attended the boarding school, with Will going on develop PTSD and Rupert suffering from depression (Picture: Chanel 4)
The former Pop Idol icon has often spoken about the horrors he and other children were subjected to at the school, and said that for five years, some of the adults he lived among ‘were sexual predators’.
‘We had a person that would look at our penises, and we’d have to cover up ourselves in the baths and showers,’ he recalled in a previous interview.
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‘We were allowed to have a phone, and that was ripped out of the wall twice.
‘I saw a child thrown across the room, I saw a child’s head bashed into the radiator.’
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