A 19-year-old former pupil of Methodist College Belfast was awarded nearly €60,000 in damages after alleging he was subjected to 'degrading' videos and bullying on a school rugby trip to Portugal. The school admitted liability for negligence and failure to supervise the boys.
A 19-year-old was awarded nearly €60,000 in damages for ‘degrading’ videos on a school rugby tripformer school, a grammar school in Belfast named Methodist College Belfast. He said he was left traumatised by degrading videos that had been taken of him on a school trip. He was in lower sixth – the UK equivalent of fifth year – at the time of the trip when the videos were taken, still legally a child.
The school has admitted liability in relation to negligence and a failure to supervise the boys. His mother, Sian Mawhinney, told the BBC: “Gabriel came back from this trip a totally different child than the one that we sent away and I think no mother expects these events to take place on a school trip.”I ended my situationship six months ago but I’m still not over him.
Still, while the details struck me as familiar, when I heard about McConkey’s case I did find myself thinking: really? Has nothing changed? I had assumed the world of school rugby had a moment of reckoning, back in 2018 with the notorious “rugby rape trial”. In that trial a group of young men were charged variously with sexual offences and another, Rory Harrison, with concealing evidence, after a young woman reported them to police.
I thought all this would have served as enough of an embarrassment for a major cultural shift. Really, it should have. And even in the absence of a major cultural shift, it seems mad to me that a few years on from this trial, a group of rugby boys were taken on a school trip and left unsupervised to the extent some were forced to run around naked and perform sex acts on toys.
SCHOOL BULLYING RUGBY CULTURE LEGAL CASE SEXUAL HARASSMENT DAMAGES
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