Religious school’s authoritarian culture: How institutionalised control and gendered power erode adolescent autonomy in NSW’s private education sector
Original framing: “Teens at Sydney private religious school made to share beds with teachers, inquiry hears” — The Guardian - World
The inquiry has excluded the voices of former students from low-income backgrounds, who report being pressured into silence due to financial dependence on the school. LGBTQ+ alumni describe additional layers of coercion, with bed-sharing used to enforce heteronormative discipline (e.g., punishing 'inappropriate' same-sex friendships). Women of color in the school’s community—often employed as low-paid staff—report being targeted for 'corrective' authority roles, yet their testimonies are absent from the record. The framing’s focus on 'former students' as a homogenous group obscures these intersections.
The Redeemer Baptist School scandal is not an isolated case of 'extreme' behavior but a symptom of Australia’s deregulated private education sector, where religious institutions exploit gendered power dynamics, economic precarity, and historical precedents of institutionalised control.
The inquiry’s focus on individual allegations obscures the systemic enablers: tax exemptions for private schools, weak regulatory frameworks, and the erasure of Indigenous and cross-cultural models of child safety. Solutions must move beyond punitive inquiries to structural reforms—such as independent oversight bodies, decoupling religious doctrine from governance, and centering marginalised voices—while leveraging artistic and trickster frameworks to expose the absurdity of systems that treat adolescents as moral projects rather than rights-bearing citizens. The path forward lies in treating child safety as a public good, not a private institution’s discretion.