At 14, Gareth thought his teacher 'loved' him. Decades later, he realised the truth.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of child abuse .

When Gareth first noticed his young chemistry teacher, Miss Sally Ann Bowen, 27, boarding the same school bus, he was just 13 years old. She was attractive, described by the schoolboys as "beautiful, ranked number one".

Their first significant interaction came on that school bus one day. Gareth, never shy with teachers, leaned forward and told Miss Bowen and her colleague that everyone could smell their perfume when they boarded. What followed was a strange exchange.

"[She] made a big thing out of this, and started saying, 'Oh, what do we smell of? How do we smell? What are you trying to say?'" Gareth recalled on a podcast called Lucky Boy.

She wanted him to say they smelled like fish — a crude sexual joke to get a 13-year-old student to deliver.

When Gareth finally understood what she was suggesting, he was embarrassed but played along. "When I eventually said fish... she was so delighted that her little joke had come to fruition."

By the following year, when Gareth was 14, Miss Bowen began taking the same bus as him to and from school.

"I've got a lot of images of her standing at that bus stop in my head, of me arriving at the bus stop, and her standing there."

Soon they were sitting together, talking about their weekends and discussing which male teachers Miss Bowen found attractive.

"Of course, that made me feel extremely special," Gareth remembered.

"She's got 900 kids there, and she selects me. I thought I was something special. I just didn't know what kind of special that meant."

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One afternoon, at an Italian café near the school, the pair's student/teacher relationship took a turn.

Gareth and his friends had followed a classmate named Ben to the café, after he had stolen pornographic magazines. When Ben began waving the magazines around, Gareth grabbed one to stop his friend's behaviour. Miss Bowen, who visited the café regularly, happened to be there.

After the other boys left, Gareth sat opposite Miss Bowen. "She said, 'We've still got that magazine.' At first, I think I said, 'No.' I think I questioned why she wanted it, and she's just sort of said, 'Give me the magazine.'"

Gareth assumed she was going to confiscate it. Instead, "she opens it up under the table so it's out of sight, and she starts flicking through the pages.

"She then just came to a page and she pointed it, and she said, 'That's what mine looks like.'" Confused, Gareth asked what she meant. "That's what my p**sy looks like," she replied.

The boundary between teacher and student, adult and child, had been completely shattered.

Gareth began walking Miss Bowen home after school, and eventually entered her house for tea. On a later visit, he asked which room was hers. "I said, 'I think that room's yours.' I said, 'Well, we surely we can sit here and drink our tea.' And she said, 'I'll go downstairs and get the tea.' And she sat next to me on the bed."

"We were close together. Our heads were close together. We were looking at each other, and then I just started kissing," Gareth recounted.

When they eventually had sex, Gareth was so inexperienced he didn't even recognise what was happening. "It's just a feeling that I'd never had before in my life. I didn't understand how it felt. I couldn't recognise that I had actually had sex."

Walking home after that first time, Gareth felt like "a really lucky boy". Miss Bowen warned him not to tell anyone about their relationship, but she needn't have worried. "You think a 14-year-old boy's gonna blow the whistle?"

As the interactions continued, their encounters became more frequent and regular.

"On a Thursday, I can tell you this for a fact, on a Thursday, we had games all afternoon. Thursday games. I used to go to her house all afternoon, and Thursday was a day I had lots of sex."

Meanwhile, rumours began circulating throughout the school. Miss Bowen's friend, Heather McIsaac, approached Gareth in the hallway one day.

"She said, 'I know what's going on. I know what's going on with you and Sally Ann. I don't agree with it, what you two are doing.' Then she just walks away."

Gareth's mother, Philippa, eventually heard the rumours from his older brother Freddie.

"She went nuts," Gareth remembered. She immediately contacted his head of year, Mr. Tint.

"I spoke to the school several times, and they didn't want to tell me anything," Philippa recalled.

Rather than investigating the allegations, Mr. Tint deflected: "He said, 'Do you think he's on something?'" Philippa even called in their family doctor to test Gareth for drugs. He was negative.

The evidence continued mounting. One day, claimed Gareth, he and Miss Bowen went to a pub near his home.

"She tried to buy me alcohol, but they weren't going for the school trousers and white shirt business. They clocked I was a kid."

Afterwards, he impulsively took glasses from the pub back to his house, including one with Miss Bowen's lipstick on it.

When Philippa discovered these strange glasses, she called the school again. This time, Mr. Tint told her: "Well, the problem will now stop, because she'll no longer be teaching again... Miss Bowen's leaving at the end of term, and I'd been assured that she would never teach again."

Around the same time, Miss Bowen told Gareth that school officials had confronted her about the relationship. "They know, they know. They called me in for a meeting," she said, describing a confrontation with four male teachers, including the headmaster.

They allowed her to finish the term but wouldn't renew her contract. Despite this, the school took no further action to protect Gareth, and the didn't report the crime.

The relationship became increasingly brazen. Gareth once kissed Miss Bowen in the chemistry lab during school break. On her last day, she even took him to end-of-year staff drinks where they sat together in full view of other teachers.

When the relationship finally ended, it wasn't because Miss Bowen acknowledged any wrongdoing. "She didn't say, 'We have to stop because this is wrong or the school's found out,'" Gareth explained. "She said, 'I'm ending it because I'm going to a kibbutz in Israel and I don't know when I'll be back.'"

The aftermath was devastating. Gareth began to unravel, getting into violent fights with classmates who insulted Miss Bowen. "I got in fights because boys called her a slag in front of me." One fight was particularly brutal: "I think I split his skull open... I think I actually stamped on his head."

Eventually, the school asked Gareth's parents to remove him. By 16, his relationship with his mother had completely broken down. He became homeless, began self-harming, and attempted suicide multiple times.

"I was putting out cigarettes on my hands from when I was 16, I was cutting myself, and it led up to like three suicide attempts before I was 23," he revealed.

The abuse distorted his understanding of relationships and sexuality for decades. "Sex isn't an emotional thing to me. I don't engage my f**king emotions. Sex is a physical act to me, and that's not right."

For years, Gareth considered the relationship a point of pride, even taking responsibility for it.

"In my mind, for many years, that wasn't really her fault. In fact, I probably took blame for it, because, you know, I walked her home. I pursued her, if you like. Must have been my fault."

The turning point came when he became a stepfather. When his stepson turned 14, Gareth saw childhood with new eyes.

"My son became 14, and I could still see his little dimples… and he wanted to play Xbox with me... That hit me hard. I remember thinking, 'This woman wasn't your girlfriend, mate. She was sick.' Because what kind of woman's interested in this boy here?"

His perspective shifted further when he discovered Miss Bowen was still teaching. The assurance the school had given his mother that she would "never teach again" had been a lie. Rather, she had moved through 13 different schools over the years.

Around his early 40s, Gareth finally called the police. Without witnesses willing to corroborate his story, building a case proved difficult. After six years of investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case due to insufficient evidence.

His world was further shaken when a former schoolmate recognised him on the tube.

"You were the one f**king that chemistry teacher, Miss Bowen... you're not the only one," Gareth recalled the man saying.

Those five words — "you're not the only one" — felt like the ultimate betrayal to Gareth. Until then, he'd believed their "relationship" was special. That he was special.

In 2022, the Teaching Regulation Agency held a hearing about the case. It was here that Gareth, now 50, saw Miss Bowen — in her 60s — for the first time in decades. She denied everything, describing him as "a pest" who had a crush on her, and claiming that she was "only ever friendly" toward him.

During the hearing, Gareth broke protocol and addressed her directly: "You know the truth. We do know the truth, Sally Ann, and you know you had sex with me on multiple occasions."

He pleaded with her: "Cleanse your soul, man, don't take that s**t with you, because you take that s**t with you, it's going to be on your soul. Just own it. Own it."

In December 2023, the panel found Gareth's testimony "consistent and convincing" and banned Miss Bowen from teaching indefinitely.

After the decision, another victim came forward. "Sanjay" revealed that he, too, had been groomed by Miss Bowen, along with a small group of boys who would meet her at the same café near the school grounds. Shockingly, Sanjay remembered Gareth being part of this group, though Gareth had no memory of this.

Sanjay described increasingly inappropriate behaviour occurring openly: "I put my hand between her legs, on her lap in the café." A third student, referred to as "the cricketer," also confirmed having had a sexual relationship with Miss Bowen, though he viewed it as "a positive experience".

Learning about other victims forced Gareth to completely re-frame his experience. "It's not nice to sit here and think I was basically like a play thing, and that I was really nothing," he said. "I feel a lot more used... I'm slowly realising that, like, yeah, I don't think she ever loved me."

Like Gareth, Sanjay also initially felt special when his teacher gave him attention. He became "infatuated" with Miss Bowen. After declining an invitation to a fireworks party at her house, he regretted the missed opportunity for years, wondering if he'd "chickened out of something that could have been important". It was only much later — when he heard how severely Gareth had been affected — that Sanjay began to question whether he'd narrowly escaped a similar fate.

The third victim, described only as "the cricketer," still maintains his relationship with Miss Bowen was "a positive experience" and declined to discuss it further, illustrating the complex ways male victims process their experiences.

This reluctance to identify as victims is common among male survivors of sexual abuse. According to the lawyer who represented Gareth, the average age for male victims to come forward is between 35 and 50 years old, meaning it typically takes more than a quarter-century before they're ready to face what happened to them. Cultural attitudes that celebrate teenage boys' sexual experiences with older women create a harmful framework that can prevent victims from recognising their abuse for decades.

The perception that teenage boys are always sexually eager and should feel "lucky" to receive attention from older women leaves many victims shouldering blame for their own abuse. This toxic cultural narrative helps explain why young Gareth felt himself fortunate rather than victimised.

Today, Gareth continues to struggle with the long-term effects of his abuse. Unable to work due to mental health issues, he's still processing the realisation that what he once thought made him "special" was actually a profound violation that altered the course of his life.

*Names were changed on the podcast for privacy.

If you or anyone you know needs expert help, please contact Bravehearts — an organisation providing support to victims of child abuse. If you are concerned about the welfare of a child, you can get advice from the Child Abuse Protection Hotline (1800 688 009) or the 24-Hour Child Abuse Report Line (131 478).

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