Singer Will Young has opened up about his childhood of sexual abuse and violence at school.
The Leave Right Now singer went to a private prep school as a child and young teenager, where he says sexual and physical abuse was rife.
Teachers, he said, would be drunk, violent and abusive, and ripped phones out of the wall so scared children couldn’t call their parents or contact Childline.
Will went to the preparatory boarding school for several years, and was later diagnosed with PTSD over the abuse he had lived through.
The singer first opened up about the horror in a 2021 interview with The Guardian, and has now revealed how he and other children were manipulated into keeping quiet.
Speaking to Mariella Frostrup on , he said that ‘ironically,’ he felt ‘very fortunate’ to be sent to the private school.
His parents ‘didn’t have a lot of money,’ and the school would constantly remind him how hard his parents were working to send him there, a type of messaging Will points out ‘often happens when people are in abusive situations.’
‘My dad just set up his business. It was a recession… so you keep quiet as a child, Absolutely.’
Will said that if his ‘incredible’ parents had ever caught wind of the physical and sexual abuse, ‘they would have taken me out of that school in two seconds’.
The former Pop Idol icon reiterated the horrors he and other children were subjected to at the school, and said that for five years, some of the adults he lived among ‘were sexual predators’.
‘We had a person that would look at our penises, and we’d have to cover up ourselves in the baths and showers,’ he told the show.
‘We were allowed to have a phone, and that was ripped out of the wall twice.
‘I saw a child thrown across the room, I saw a child’s head bashed into the radiator.’
Will traces his PTSD back to the abuse and fear he suffered at the school.
His twin brother, Rupert Young, also attended; he died by suicide in 2020 after battling depression for 20 years.
