[insert nc3.wav here with: Emily Rice's recollections of Kuper Island residential school]

       Little wonder that Mel H. Buffalo, an adviser to the Samson band in Hobbema, Alberta, reported that 'every Indian person I have spoken to who attended these schools has a story of mental, physical or sexual abuse to relate.'

       As bad as sexual abuse by school staff was, it was only part of a larger problem of sexual exploitation of residential school students. Residential schools' student populations were perceived by some deviates as prime targets. Also, student sexual abuse was often a feature of a general environment of violence, sexual and otherwise. A female student of the File Hills school recalled a great deal of bullying and intimidation in both the boys' and girls' dormitories. But one boy she knew was also the victim of repeated sexual assaults, sometimes gang rapes, by bigger boys. A female Ojibwa student at Pelican Lake school near Sioux Lookout was one of several girls who were both sexually and physically molested by other girls, to the point that she had to leave the school after four years. During her time in Pelican Lake, the girls' dormitory had effectively been 'run' by a ring of bigger girls who followed the instructions of one particularly brutal female. This situation was much like the one that prevailed at Alert Bay in the later 1950s, where the supervisors allowed a gang to control the girls' quarters. A former student recalled that a group of bullies would beat up girls on command by Barbara, 'the head honcho' in the junior girls' dormitory. She remembered that supervisors systematically avoided confrontations and invariably were nowhere to be found when an infraction took place. What benefit the arrangement had for staff could be seen in the fact that the 'gang' in the dormitory enforced school rules as well as their own dictates and whims.

The general problem of lax supervision made it all the easier for such practices to go undetected. Further compounding the problem that victims faced was the fact that there was little they could do to call in authority to put an end to the abuse. Reporting violence, sexual and otherwise, by fellow students usually meant retribution. And to whom did one report sexual exploitation if the perpetrator was an adult staff member? It usually was unthinkable to take complaints against one missionary to another. And for many of the students, their conditioning made it difficult to tell their families. In many cases they had been raised by Christianised parents to regard missionaries as holy people who were there to assist them. It was also extremely difficult to inform parents of mistreatment by mail, because outgoing letters were censored.