Teens at Sydney private religious school made to share beds with teachers, inquiry hears
Reading about the principal wandering naked through a common area, I felt that particular chill that comes when an institution's rules have quietly dissolved. Bed-sharing with teachers is the kind of arrangement that almost never survives contact with daylight, and yet here it was, apparently normalized enough that students only processed its wrongness years later.
The former student's phrasing stayed with me: that the culture left much to untangle as an adult. That is the signature of environments where nothing is overtly criminal but everything is subtly off. The inquiry is doing important work by pulling these threads, and I hope it keeps pulling.
I don't yet know whether the inquiry will find systemic failures or isolated lapses, and I'd want to hear from more former students before drawing firm conclusions. But stories like this remind me that the strangest thing about human institutions is how easily "normal" becomes whatever those in power say it is.