The big interview: My father, the abuser
Therapy Today, March 2024

When psychotherapist Jenny Pearson learned that her estranged father was a child abuser, her assumptive world tilted on its axis. Her story is now widely known, after Radio 5 Live presenter Nicky Campbell revealed on air in July 2022 that he was one of the many boys at a prestigious Edinburgh school who were serially abused by teachers and school staff over many years, with no one taking steps to halt it. Since his revelation hundreds of other former pupils have come forward to tell their stories of abuse at two of Scotland’s most esteemed public schools for boys.

Jenny’s father, Hamish Dawson, was a highly respected teacher and housemaster at the Edinburgh Academy from the early 1950s until 1983, when he took early retirement, allegedly after pornography was found in his briefcase, and he died in 2009. Details of the abuse have been presented to the ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. On hearing his revelations, Jenny contacted and subsequently recorded a follow-up podcast with Campbell, which was broadcast in February 2023.

Catherine Jackson: Having learned about your father’s abuse, what impelled you to contact Nicky Campbell? You knew you couldn’t necessarily be connected with him by anyone, including your clients, as you use your married name. Why did you decide to reach out to Nicky? What did you hope to achieve? 

Jenny Pearson: I wanted to tell him who I was, how appalled I was that he’d been abused by my father, and to ask him what I could do. And to tell him how sorry I was. I think that impulse stems from a core value – if this is the truth, it needs to be out there. I felt that Nicky, as a public figure, had done something extraordinarily brave and powerful. And I wanted him to know I had not just heard him but heard him as the daughter of one of his abusers. Also, because of the close relationship between the school where I was a pupil, a teacher and then a counsellor – which was the sister school to the Academy – there were, I knew, thousands of folk who knew who my father was.  

CJ: I hear the therapist instinct in there – your urge to validate Nicky’s experience by telling him you believe him, even though it was your father he was naming as his abuser. 

JP: Yes, but not just to say ‘I hear you, and I want to hear you’ but also to tell him that I was not in any way frightened of his truth. And it was in that conversation that Nicky said, almost wistfully, with a question mark at the end, ‘I think we need to do something with this; I think we need to make a podcast’ And I said words to the effect of, ‘This is your world, Nicky, let’s see where it goes.’ And from there, it all moved very quickly. We recorded our conversation in October, and it was extremely powerful. It was like we were speaking the same language – from different positions but making the same sense of our discoveries. There was a kinship there, and that’s what everyone felt after the podcast – they couldn’t believe how deep our relationship was that October morning in a wee studio in Edinburgh – that it was the first time we’d met.

CJ: At the time the podcast went out, you were, and still are, a practising psychotherapist. Did you prepare your clients in any way?

JP: Yes, I warned almost all my clients and all but one of my supervisees, and there are complex reasons for that decision that I can’t go into without compromising their confidentiality. The clients I didn’t tell were the youngest ones, the children and young people I worked with when I was a school counsellor for 17 years. I decided, with my supervisor, that it was not going to be helpful for them to know this stuff. It would intrude too much on their world. They have left and moved on; I have left the school and moved on. They didn’t need the backstory. For me, our relationship felt too precious. That’s maybe not the right word. I felt it needed to be left intact. And to date, as far as I know, it has been, although I know that could change at any moment. Because the thing with podcasts is that people can download them literally any time, and I may have to deal with that in the future.  

CJ: Do you have a strategy if one of them does get in touch with you?

JP: I will respond as I have with my adult clients – I will tell them how it is. The first people I told were the supervisees who were working with children at the time or had some interest in the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and those who’d been abused themselves or worked with women who’ve been abused. I was very clear about who I needed to prioritise, because I was absolutely determined that they should not hear about it second-hand. They were, to a person, unbelievably grateful and unbelievably supportive, without exception. They were profuse in their thanks in an incredibly humbling way. I already believed in the calibre of their work, but when I disclosed the enormity of that part of me – because it is only a part of me, it’s not the whole of me – they were extraordinary in their responses.

CJ: And your clients?

JP: These days, I have a very small counselling practice. I had a stroke two years ago and since then I’ve not taken on anyone new – only returning clients who’ve been away for a while and come back for a top-up. And all my clients are very mature, chronologically and emotionally, and we go back a long way. It’s the same with my supervisees; a lot of them are former students, because I taught counselling for 12 years and, after a period of being out in the counselling world, many students came back either for supervision or therapy, and after an appropriate length of time I agreed. What was very rich in that was that we weren’t starting from scratch. We knew each other. I had a sense of them and their practice.  

CJ: And your supervisor? How did they rise to this? 

JP: Very wonderfully. She has been an absolute rock – everything I would hope for from a supervisor. She has helped me explore the question marks I had about what I was doing and why, and has always trusted that I will do what is right for me to do. And that’s been a very powerful, very consistent message. ‘Jenny, you need to do what is right for you’. And the fact that she trusted me helped me trust myself and in turn, if you like, my supervisees have trusted me. So we have journeyed together. It hasn’t dominated our sessions but they have been aware. Sometimes they’ll say in a session, ‘Jenny, I know there was x y z on the television last night’, or ‘I read The Scotsman last week’, or ‘I read The Sunday Times’. They will bring it in, and we will wrap it up in two or three sentences. They’ll ask how I am, and I will tell them, and we go straight on into the work. Because now it’s out there – I have absolutely no control about when it’s on the news, or when it’s in the papers. But there are areas where I do have control, and I have held that – I’m putting my hands together in a kind of basket here – I’ve held that in a way that has worked for me.  

CJ: What kind of aspects? 

JP: What I say and when I say it, how I say it, the language I choose, and especially the amount of emotional space I need. I have commanded that and not let anything or anyone occupy it. Because I have needed masses of emotional space for this, absolutely masses. And that is what has enabled me to keep practising – in part the very small caseload but also the personal space. By that I mean cutting off at 5pm, without exception, and never working outside the three days I allocate to my clinical practice. Never, ever talking, thinking, eating, breathing, sleeping anything therapeutic on Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays or Sundays. Those spaces I have complete control over, and that’s been critical. Sometimes it can go for weeks with nothing in the media, and then there’s an absolute barrage because maybe Nicky has said something else in a paper or on the TV news or something, and then there’s this great surge of interest. And that’s why those personal spaces are so critical. Because even if it happens on one of my clinical days I know that very soon after I will have a non-clinical day and will be able to process it. 

Ironically, for me a much bigger disclosure came before this, when I had to tell everyone I’d had a stroke, because I was very limited by it initially. I say to people, I always give thanks that I had my stroke seven months before Nicky’s revelation, because my self-care, which had always been good, was absolutely rock solid because of my stroke, if that makes sense. And this was another area where my supervisor was absolutely invaluable, because the stroke changed my life with as much impact as the way Nicky’s revelation changed my life.  

CJ: Does it affect you that you know there are photographs and news reports and the podcast out there? Or do you just put it out of your mind because you can’t see it? 

JP: I see it as one domain of my history and my current life. But it doesn’t personify me. It is not the whole of Jenny Pearson. With the photos there are some they haven’t yet used, and I suppose I was interested in their choice of the ones they did use. And it has been said, and it’s something Nicky has said, that I look like my father. It was something I was concerned about for him when we met, because I knew he would see a resemblance. In other words, I looked like his abuser 

CJ: That’s a hard place to inhabit, I would imagine.  

JP: It’s something I say in the podcast – I don’t want to look like my father or my mother.

I don’t want their blood in my veins. But I am very much my own person. So, I know there are resemblances, but I’m OK about how I look

CJ: What about what was best for your clients? Was that necessarily the same thing?

JP: What I took from that was that, if I was being honest and congruent, then my work would continue to be honest and congruent, as it had always been prior to this crisis. Fortunately, because I’d worked with my clients and my supervisees for a very, very long time, and we had very well-established relationships, I think we both believed that if I was being how I needed to be, the work would continue in the way it needed to continue. And it’s the case; this has not caused any rupture. I think perhaps sometimes when clients arrive at the door, they look at me in a slightly different way. But my antennae have always been very acute, probably because of my abusive history, so I am probably just more alert to their reactions. But essentially, I am confident they believe I am alright, or they wouldn’t be coming to the session. And they know that if I wasn’t alright I’d tell them and rearrange the session. They know me that well. And again, I had had a dress rehearsal, if you like, because of my stroke. I had gone through this with each and every single one of them.

I think the bottom line is that my clients trust me. And we do whatever it is we need to do together. So, if they need to check out how I am within the therapeutic frame I tell them. I am honest with them. And if I wasn’t OK, I wouldn’t be practising.

CJ: You say in the podcast that you’ve spoken to quite a lot of the victims of your father, on a one-to-one, personal basis. I wonder, was that as a therapist or as you? 

JP: I don’t want to say it wasn’t therapeutic; I think it was therapeutic for both parties, on every single occasion, in person and on the phone, because a lot has been on the phone. But it has never ever been me as a therapist; it’s been me, Jenny, and not me, my father’s daughter. 

CJ: Another thing I wonder from listening to the podcast is to what extent you are finding a community of support with your father’s victims. Have you found your tribe in the way that we can get support from contact with a group of people who’ve had similar experiences? You are getting perhaps some of that from these conversations too? 

JP: The former pupils who have contacted me have been really open with me about this. They tell me they were incredibly moved by the podcast, and incredibly saddened to hear about what my life was like, living in the school. Because, of course, I was a sort of enemy to the boys and certainly for the boarders. I was there but not there, on the other side of the interconnecting door, although sometimes that divide was blurred. So yes, each and every one of us, we get it. I remember reading a piece of research years ago when I did my master’s in the US into how abused children are drawn to animals who have been abused. And I can remember being absolutely fascinated, thinking yes, the abuse is something we all share. And you don’t necessarily have to talk about it with another abused person; it’s an unspoken understanding. There’s a fundamental understanding, and a deep empathy. Sometimes during the abuse inquiry hearings we would just look at each other and we didn’t need to say anything. Because we all knew the truth of what we’d just heard, or we’d just read. It was just extraordinary.

CJ: Something else I picked up from the podcast was your motivation to expose the secrets, the lies and the collusion. What impelled and continues to impel you? 

JP: I strive for the truth in everything I do. When Nicky disclosed what he disclosed I felt morally compelled to act. And I also wanted to discover the truth about my father. That was very compelling, and remains compelling, because I keep being told stuff about him that I knew absolutely nothing about, because throughout those years until I left home at 18, never to go back, I barely saw him. He was always ‘with the boys’. And I grew up believing he was exemplary, that he was the best teacher ever, the best housemaster ever; that he was adored by parents, pupils and colleagues. And it was true; it was certainly a part of him. He was very skilled in his work, and also in his ability to delude people. Because the people who believed this are good, good people.  

And he was an important role model for me. As a teacher, I thought he must be great, because every time I saw him with the boys it looked like perfection. It looked like how it should be – an air of authority but with the ability to make learning fun.  

My mother was the one I hid from. She’s the one I ran away from. She was the one I wanted gone. My father was already gone, ‘with the boys’. It was my mother who made my life absolute hell in bright red capital letters. She was vicious, deeply narcissistic, cruel, and physically and emotionally abusive. She was a terrifying woman and my father brought that out from her as well. He knew how unstable she was, but he abandoned us, my elder sister and me. He went through to the boys. He had an escape. He literally left us. 

CJ: So to see your idol falling from the pedestal must have been very challenging for you. I wonder how you have dealt with that?

JP: He wrote me a letter in 1990 saying neither he nor my mother wanted anything more to do with me, and my opinion of him changed from that day. I’d been estranged from them since 1986. What I didn’t know until more recently was that my mother never knew about the letter even though it supposedly came from both of them. So my opinion of my father was rock bottom some way before Nicky went public. I had years of therapy for that. I’ve even looked at that letter differently on the back of Nicky’s revelations, because I have wondered, did he want rid of me because he thought something was going to come out? I really would love to know his motivation. And of course, I’ve had to join up the dots differently, and I can’t join them all up because both my parents are dead.

CJ: I guess the obvious closing question is, where are the positives in all this?

JP: The positives are that thousands of people who were abused in childhood have come forward to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. And all their truths will, we hope, in some way ensure that this never happens again. That is one of the current positives and the hoped for potential positives, because these things must never happen again. It’s not just the abuse, it’s the cover-up and collusion. Whether it’s Hamish Dawson, Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, these things happened and went on happening for years and years because people refused to face the truth. So the truth isn’t positive, but the truth is out, and once it’s out, it can’t ever go back to being not known. Even during the hearings, there were more men coming forward. Some of the former pupils I have spoken to had told no one. I was the first person they told, and I always remember one of them saying to me that, having spoken with me, he was hoping he’d be able to talk to his wife. This was a guy who’s literally my age, mid-60s, and I said I hoped that, if it was right for him and his wife, it might happen in time. And he said, ‘I think I know what she will say.’ And I thought, ‘Yes, I think I know what she will say as well.’ And he said, ‘I think she’ll say, “Oh, that explains a lot”.’ So, another positive is that there has been healing in relationships that had voids in them because of all the secrets.

Personally, too, I feel braver. I don’t do dependency, so my stroke was far more challenging than Nicky’s revelations. I lost a lot of confidence after it, and this has emboldened me to rebuild my life in a different way. I felt completely broken emotionally and this has helped me see that I’m not broken. Because if this hasn’t broken me, I don’t think anything can break me until my death. So, I am strengthened, more hopeful. And it has deepened some of my relationships with my friends because I’ve had to let them in. They haven’t always known how to support me. And they’ve been honest about that, and we’ve looked at that together, because they knew I needed space, but they also wanted to support me, and it was a very difficult balance for them.  

And I’ve come to know all these Accies [former pupils at the Academy] who are just extraordinary, wonderful people to have in my life. 

And I have been able to excavate stuff that’s been buried deep, deep in the pit of my stomach and the core of my soul, and I feel freed. It’s like the Johari window with its four panes: the open window, the blind window, the hidden window and the unknown window. And I have been taken into all those windows by this process. My personal therapy took me into all those windows, my therapeutic work takes me into all those windows, and this whole experience has taken me into knowledge I didn’t know I had. And now the knowledge is with me for keeps, and that is extraordinarily powerful. It has shown me domains and dimensions of me that I maybe had a whiff of, in other parts of my life, be it sport, my teaching or my therapeutic work, but I didn’t know the depths of what I know now about myself and my own capacities.

CJ: What would be your advice to somebody else facing a similar choice? 

JP: I don’t give advice because I don’t think I have any business to. Like my supervisor always wisely says, ‘Jenny, you need to do what is right for you.’ People will find a way. They might not do what I think they should, but that’s irrelevant. People have to do what they have to do. And that’s a huge part of my work. I think it’s called faith.

• The award-winning episode of Different, featuring Nicky Campbell’s conversation with Jenny, first broadcast on 22 February 2023, and a follow-up episode broadcast on 30 November in response to the Panorama documentary, can be downloaded at the BBC website.

• A Panorama documentary, ‘My Teacher the Abuser: fighting for justice’, covering the abuse at the Edinburgh Academy and Fettes College, was broadcast on 30 November 2023, and is available on BBC iPlayer.