The ongoing danger of Iain Wares

WOMEN AND MEN AGAINST CHILD ABUSE

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WARES is not just an old man. He is a career sex offender who left behind decades of wreckage — boys beaten in the dark, assaulted in changing rooms, silenced by fear, and forced to carry his violence into their adult lives. Now 85 and walking freely along the coast of Fish Hoek, he is too often spoken about with pity. But his victims do not remember him as frail. They remember the bat he used to beat them. They remember the way he used his hands. They remember the silence he enforced.

From the 1960s to the early 2000s, Wares operated unchecked in elite boys’ schools across the UK and South Africa. At Edinburgh Academy and Fettes College, he didn’t only molest children — he struck them, humiliated them, manipulated them. One survivor recalls being dragged from bed in the middle of the night and violently assaulted. Another, broadcaster Nicky Campbell, described watching Wares masturbate a 10-year-old boy in the changing room while other children stood frozen. This wasn’t hidden. This was routine.