The Hidden Wounds Behind Public Scandal - Andrew and Epstein.

The Epstein files and the news surrounding Prince Andrew have dominated headlines recently. Last week, talking with my mother, we found ourselves reflecting on how the era we each grew up in shaped our understanding of our bodies, our sexuality, and our place in the world as girls and women.

For women of my generation, teenagers in the late eighties and nineties, the messages came in consistently; your body exists for men's pleasure, and your worth is measured by your attractiveness to them. There was very little guidance around relationships, self-respect, or what we ourselves might want or feel. On my course, when we explore the experience of going through puberty at boarding school, I am yet to hear a woman describe receiving any healthy, honest guidance about her own sexuality, her desires, or even her right to have boundaries.

Men, too, receive deeply confusing messages about sex and women and I see the lasting damage this causes. Many men spend years, sometimes decades, seeking sexual connection when what they are truly hungering for is love and intimacy. The two have become so tangled that they can not tell them apart.

Which brings me back to Prince Andrew.

 He was, by all accounts, Queen Elizabeth's favoured child. Yet, at just eight years old, he was sent away to boarding school. At eight years old, he is barely out of infancy in emotional terms and suddenly he is required to manage entirely on his own. To adopt the stiff upper lip. To suppress every need for comfort, warmth, love or parenting.

 Last week my mother asked me, "Why do you think he fell under the spell of a man like Epstein?"

 I can see this through a Boarding School Syndrome lens. When children are sent away to boarding school at such a young age, they are often told it is the best possible thing for them. However their nervous systems tell a very different story. They may feel unsafe and frightened and they feel profoundly alone. Beneath all of that is a deep, aching yearning to be held and loved by their mother, alongside a quiet, corrosive belief that there must be something wrong with them for being sent away in the first place.

 The combination of loneliness, low self-worth, and an unmet need to feel special makes a child extraordinarily vulnerable to grooming and abuse. It is no coincidence that we are seeing wave after wave of reports exposing decades of abuse within boarding school institutions. These environments, however prestigious, can leave lasting wounds.

 There is something else I see consistently in the men I work with that may also help explain Andrew's story. Boarding school life offers almost no privacy. They live in dormitories, changing rooms and communal spaces where you are never truly alone. Many tell me that even the toilets offered little refuge, with no locks on the doors, or other boys peering over and under. In an environment like that, the only truly private space a child has is inside his own mind. And so that is where a child retreats. Boys learns to compartmentalise with extraordinary skill and manage to keep whole parts of themselves carefully hidden, locked away from the world, known only to him.

It is a survival strategy at the time, but it becomes a way of life.

I find myself wondering whether this is part of what drew Andrew so deeply into Epstein's world. Away from the relentless scrutiny of royal life, away from the weight of the "Prince Andrew" he was required to be in Britain, could Epstein have offered him something that felt very different from his identity at home? A space where a different, more hidden version of himself could come out? For a man conditioned from childhood to keep so much of himself concealed, that kind of permission, however dangerous the source, can be extraordinarily powerful.

Something else to consider is that when children go away to school and their attachments at home are broken, it becomes imperative to attach to your peers. Literally your survival depends on it else, in a Lord of the Flies style, you may get ousted from the group, ostracised and bullied ferociously. I often hear from adults, who feel guilt about not supporting their younger siblings more when they arrived at the schol. What isn't understood is the importance of the hierrachies at school and how maintaining your attachment to your peer group and your status becomes more important than looking out for your younger sibling. This doesn't feel like a choice at the time, but a survival strategy. This is why many ex-boarders describe their friends at school as their siblings, as they become so out of necessity. So again, looking at the relationships between Epstein and Andrew, it has made me wonder if there was an element of this attachment and trauma going on.

We will never know the full nature of the power Epstein held over Andrew. However, as a boy who was deprived of love, warmth and security from such a young age, being in Epstein's orbit and being chosen, being favoured, being made to feel special must have been extraordinarily compelling.

Compelling enough, it seems, that he lost sight of his own integrity entirely.