Seventeen by Joe Gibson review an abuse of trust

This unflinching memoir explores consent, coercion and the lasting impact of a teacher-pupil affair

In this unflinching memoir, Joe Gibson recounts the affair he had as a schoolboy with his 35-year-old teacher, whom he calls Miss P. The year is 1991 and 17-year-old Gibson, who has chosen to protect his identity by using a pseudonym, has been awarded a bursary to an elite private school to study for his A-levels. Since the school is 150 miles away, his parents arrange for him to stay with friends who allow him use of their spare room, but otherwise leave him to his own devices.

Gibson initially settles in well, falling in with a clique of boys whose conversations are largely confined to rating the attractiveness of the girls in their year and pondering whether they will go to Oxford or Cambridge. But then he learns that his parents are divorcing, leaving him feeling unmoored. When he bumps into Miss P in a pub near the school, he dissolves into tears and tells her about the problems at home. “I want to hug her, to bury my head in her neck, to be wrapped in her voluminous hair,” he says, ominously.

What follows is an astonishing case of sexual misconduct and abuse of power. After requisitioning Gibson to help her clear up her classroom one evening, Miss P invites him to her flat where she plies him with wine. On the drive back to his house, they kiss and within a few weeks are having a full-blown affair. Initially, Gibson is walking on air. While his friends talk longingly of sleeping with teenage girls, he is having sex with an adult woman – what could be better? But as the months pass, the demands of the relationship start to weigh heavily. Not only do their trysts throw up major logistical problems but his every decision is informed by a fear of Miss P’s disapproval. Theirs is not a relationship of equals and there are many times when she brings up Gibson’s childishness to make him feel useless and small. Yet still he craves her company and is bereft when they are apart.

Memoirs typically come with a clear sense of place and the people in it, but not this one, which, odd as it sounds, works to its advantage. To preserve Gibson’s anonymity, and that of his family, incriminating details are necessarily absent. The result is a heightened intensity, the kind more frequently found in fiction, in which Gibson and Miss P are the main characters, and those in their orbit more opaque. It is an apt reflection of the author’s predicament: isolated from his peers, cut off from his family, existing only for Miss P, who controls all aspects of his life.

There are echoes here of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s 2020 novel My Dark Vanessa, which tells of an affair between a 15-year-old schoolgirl and her 42-year-old English teacher, and in which the girl sees their relationship as a great love affair rather than statutory rape. But had the police been alerted to Miss P’s activities at the time, she would not have been prosecuted. As Gibson explains in his afterword, it wasn’t until 2000 that it became illegal for a teacher to have a sexual relationship with a pupil aged 16 or 17. And this being the 1990s, words such as grooming and coercion weren’t common parlance, and sexual impropriety was often swept under the carpet. So it proves when Miss P’s colleagues, having got wind of the affair, do nothing to stop it; to them, protecting the reputation of the school is more important than protecting the welfare of its pupils.

Would the school do the right thing today? One hopes so. Nonetheless, in the avalanche of stories of sexual misconduct shared in the aftermath of #MeToo, little was heard from male victims of women, which is why Gibson’s book feels significant. It is a powerful tale of lost youth and a boy too young and bound up in the mores of the era to comprehend the damage being done to him. It is with a note of sadness that Gibson reveals how the title refers not just to his age when the affair began, but the number of years it took him to see Miss P’s actions for what they were. I won’t reveal how the relationship ends, but, of the many alarming moments in Seventeen, it was this part that shocked me the most. Gibson’s book shows the damage that can be wrought by impulsive actions and the awful and lasting consequences of abuse.

Seventeen is published by Simon & Schuster (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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