Trigger warning: this article discusses child sexual abuse.

The Royal Military Police last year closed an investigation into allegations of historic child sex abuse in a British Army-run school in Germany, telling victims it had been unable to prove that the alleged perpetrator was employed by the Ministry of Defence.

It took an openDemocracy reporter a few hours at a military archive to uncover an old MoD directory naming the individual as a member of the school staff. If he was directly employed by the MoD, the RMP would have jurisdiction to pursue the case.

“It feels like a cover-up,” one of the victims told openDemocracy. “It’s not in their interests to find him guilty because then they would have to admit that children were being abused at their schools and that the teachers enabled him. Now, the police have enabled him.”

The victims believe the RMP’s failings were deliberate.

“It was too messy for them, if it came out,” the other said. “We needed to be shut down. They don’t want to find him guilty because then they would be liable.”

Our discovery throws into doubt the military’s decision to claim it could not prove jurisdiction and drop its investigation. While the document we uncovered is not definitive proof of employment, it raises serious questions about the extent and effort of the RMP’s inquiries in this case, and in other cases of child sex offences in army schools that we have reviewed.

Grooming and abuse

In 1981, Anne* and Jane* were ten years old and attending a British Army-run primary school for the children of troops stationed in Germany. There, they recall, the charismatic and confident caretaker seemed untouchable.

“He had the run of the school,” Anne recalled. “There was a sense he had a lot of power. He would walk around with no top on, he would watch the girls’ dance rehearsals.”

Jane has similar memories. “He had free rein over the whole school,” she said. “He had so much freedom.” She described how the caretaker would “extract” them from their classrooms by telling teachers he needed helpers for a mundane task, then sexually abuse them.

“We would be taken out of that teaching environment,” Jane recalled. “He would lead us down the corridor to his room and abuse us. He was so good at it. There was no way we were the only victims.”

Members of a Facebook group for the school’s alumni also vividly remember the caretaker. In posts seen by openDemocracy, one recalled how, as girls, they would perform the 1979 Raceys’ hit Some Girls to him. Another woman posted how he would watch their dance routines, while others remembered him giving the girls’ sports teams lifts to and from fixtures in his car.

Besides each other, Anne and Jane told no one about the abuse they experienced, not even their parents. The pair moved on to separate schools and eventually lost contact, with Jane joining the armed forces and Anne pursuing a civilian career. Both had children of their own. But the legacy of abuse haunted them. “It’s affected me in so many ways,” said Jane.

Four decades later, Anne was ready to speak out. In 2018, she contacted the Truth Project, a public initiative that offered survivors of child sexual abuse at state-run institutions the chance to anonymously tell their stories as part of the UK government’s independent inquiry.