Amy-Jo felt doubted and disbelieved when social services and the police could not produce her records
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Amy-Jo was sexually abused by an older boy who was fostered by her parents.
She feels that her welfare was not a priority for them or social services.
Amy-Jo’s parents fostered a boy called Casey, who was four years older than Amy-Jo.
When Amy-Jo was about seven or eight years old, Casey started abusing her. She has tried to remember how often it happened and thinks it was about two or three times a week.
Her mum found out about the abuse when Amy-Jo was about 12. She came into his room one day and found him touching Amy-Jo. She says ‘I can still remember the terror now – feeling frightened and so ashamed’.
But she thinks her parents, even now, think of it more as ‘childhood experimentation’.
Amy-Jo remembers being interviewed by a police officer, but she can’t remember what she said. The family were referred for counselling, which Amy-Jo describes as ‘horrendous’, and she had to sit with her parents and siblings. She says she found it very uncomfortable and that she would never have gone into details in front of her family, especially her siblings.
She found out some years later that social services wanted to put her and her siblings on the at-risk register. Her parents did not want this, and were given the option of family counselling instead.
Because Casey was being fostered, the reported abuse was dealt with by social services. Some years later, Amy-Jo’s parents told her that social services instructed them not to talk to Amy-Jo about what had happened, and not to ask any questions.
When Casey reached the age of 18, Amy-Jo’s parents adopted him. Amy-Jo and her siblings were called in to see a judge and asked if they were happy for the adoption to go ahead. She says she wasn’t at all happy, but as she was in her early teens, she was too scared to say so to the judge.
She says the adoption ‘made me feel unloved … the fact they put his needs before mine’.
Years later, Amy-Jo had a child of her own, and she felt such love she could not understand how her parents could have allowed Casey to stay in their family after what he had done to her. Through her work, she became aware of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and she approached them about her experience.
Amy-Jo spent a difficult and frustrating year trying to obtain police and social service records, which apparently didn’t exist.
She says she began the case because she was angry and wanted retribution, but she felt let down by people she thought she ought to be able to trust. ‘It shook my faith in a lot of things’ she says.
Amy-Jo did receive a modest settlement that was limited because there was no evidence.
She was even more upset to discover later that Casey had also abused one of her siblings. They had told their parents and Amy-Jo’s father gave him a ‘stern talking to’.
Amy-Jo says ‘It raised all sorts of questions for me that I hadn’t been brave or smart enough to stand up for myself … it made me very self-critical’.
She finds it very difficult to trust anyone in relationships. ‘If someone says they love me, I don’t believe them.’ Her relationships with her family have been badly affected by her experiences.
She thinks she worries more about her children because of her past, and that she tends to ‘over-think’ things.
Amy-Jo believes someone should have talked to her at the time of the abuse and asked what they could do to help her. She says it should not have been treated as a ‘whole family problem’ because there were things she couldn’t talk about in front of her parents, and still can’t.
She feels that the police and social services should keep records longer so that victims and survivors can access them, and that schools should teach children to be aware of what is and is not appropriate, and that predators can be in your family or your home.
Amy-Jo’s parents are religious and they have often told her she should forgive Casey’s behaviour because horrendous things happened to him in children’s homes.
Recently a counsellor told her that she did not have to forgive him, and she says this made her feel relieved.