Cassius, Arnaud and Melinda
Content Warning: These stories are about violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and may include references to suicide or self-harming behaviours. They may contain graphic descriptions and strong language and may be distressing. Some narratives may be about First Nations people who have passed away. If you need support, please see Contact & support.
Cassius is a primary school student who lives with an anxiety disorder that affects his communication.
‘As he progressed through to, you know, prep and year 1, he was talking with us … starting to open up, doing his readers at school with his teacher,’ his mother Melinda told the Royal Commission. He was having speech therapy every week, but he ‘wasn’t talking a lot at school’.
In year 1 there was ‘an incident’, and Melinda went to the school. She found him ‘locked in a room … distraught’. The school said Cassius had ‘kicked the deputy principal’. They wanted to ‘suspend him indefinitely’, but allowed him back once a psychologist diagnosed him.
Meanwhile, Cassius’s parents ‘thought maybe something had happened to him’.
‘He went from wearing a short sleeve shirt and shorts to wearing a done-up at the neck, long pants even on a 40-plus degree day,’ Melinda said. ‘We couldn’t work out what was going on … And that’s what he’s told us, he does it for protection.’
About a year after the incident, Cassius disclosed that somebody at the school had sexually assaulted him.
Melinda believes the perpetrator saw him as ‘an easy target’ because ‘they think he doesn’t talk’.
‘But he does – he talks perfectly outside of school where he hasn’t been abused.’
Cassius’s father, Arnaud, said the school was ‘neglectful’ and tried to ‘bury the abuse and sexual assault … of a person with disability’.
‘Even though they knew what had happened … they tried to cover it up by trying to put the blame onto our son … onto his poor behaviours with his anxiety … All they wanted to do was to shut us down.’
Teachers kept telling Cassius ‘he’d done a bad thing’, Melinda said. He was often sent home early for ‘bad behaviour’.
‘They weren’t interested in anything we had to say in [his] defence.’
Once a teacher reprimanded Cassius for ‘wetting his pants’ when, in fact, his pants were just damp from playing outside. Another time, he was ‘accused of sexual assault’ for touching a teacher on the arm to tell her something.
‘He was wrongly accused of so many things. He was just an easy target because he didn’t have a voice at school. It was just too easy to blame him all the time,’ Melinda said.
‘There were so many times where the poor kid … he wanted a bit of extra time to finish his work … they’d snatch it away. He used to get frustrated.’
She believes teachers were deliberately ‘making him more and more anxious and more and more angry’.
‘He copped the discipline. There were days of suspension, 10 days the first time, one day, three days, five days.’
Before the abuse, Cassius was ‘going really well at school’, Arnaud said, but then the school ‘artificially generated’ these ‘poor behaviours’.
In the end, the school wanted to expel Cassius. His parents enrolled him in a new school for year 5.
‘It’s not a special school, but they have bent over backwards … and his learning is starting to increase again,’ Arnaud said.
‘He really wants to learn,’ Melinda said. ‘When he was having those suspensions, he was devastated. He used to say, “I’m missing out on so much.” … He just needs someone understanding … and then you get – great success.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.