Corrina’s foster father raped her, but her foster mother accused her of having an affair with him
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Corrina and her brother and sister experienced a chaotic childhood. Her parents were very young when they had their three children and had an abusive relationship. Corrina’s father sexually abused her.
The family moved between different caravan sites and for a while the family lived with her grandmother. Concerned about the welfare of the children, her grandmother contacted social services. Corrina remembers being taken to a meeting point, and then driven in a police car to a children’s home. She was about six years old.
She recalls several potential foster carers visiting the children in the home, and that it was difficult to find anyone who would foster all three of them, until an older couple agreed to take them on.
Corrina says the foster parents were around the age of grandparents and were very strict. The children had to ‘speak properly’ and eat with a knife and fork, none of which they had previously learnt to do. Her brother struggled with learning and their foster father made him walk round picking up items to learn the alphabet. If he made any mistakes he was not allowed to wear pants around the house.
Soon after they arrived at their new home, the foster father began to insist on taking Corrina to bed at night, although her siblings put themselves to bed. The foster mother did not intervene. For the next six years, Corrina was subjected to frequent, sometimes daily, sexual abuse by her foster father.
When social workers visited the family, Corrina never told them about the abuse. Her foster father told her that the siblings would be split up if she told anyone, and she says she definitely didn’t want that to happen.
A few years later the foster parents applied to adopt the three children but the adoption was opposed by their social worker. The couple moved the children to a different county and reapplied to adopt the two girls only. Their application was successful and Corrina’s brother was put back into care. She was a pre-teenager at this point.
The man who was now her adoptive father continued to sexually abuse Corrina, until one day when he attempted to rape her, she shouted out while her sister was in the next room. He stopped and apologised, saying it would never happen again. She now thinks the reason he stopped raping her could have been due to the fact that she had started her periods.
When Corrina was in her late teenage years, her brother moved back near to the adoptive family home. By this point he was married with a young daughter. His daughter would stay over at the family home, and Corrina noticed that her young niece had been sleeping with the abuser.
Around this time, Corrina says she began ‘acting up’. She was painted as the cause of all the family’s issues. Her adoptive mother even accused Corrina of having an affair with the man who had abused her. He demanded that Corrina pack her bags and leave the family home with him but she refused, and he left, alone.
Corrina then told her adoptive mother about the years of sexual abuse she had endured, but the older woman continued to accuse her of lying and and of having an affair with her husband. The police became involved, and later charged her abuser, but he and his wife retracted the statements they made and no further action was taken.
The abuser later moved back into the family home and Corrina says he started seeing 16-year-old girls. She wanted to move out, but had nowhere to go.
Looking back, Corrina is astonished that her abuser and his wife were able to foster and adopt children, and she feels let down by the police and social services. The family’s social worker at the time has apologised to Fiona and said that she knew ‘something wasn’t right.’
She is concerned about children the couple previously fostered and wonders if any of them were also victims of sexual abuse. She points out that inconsistent processes for adoption across different local authorities allowed an abuser to adopt her and her sister. She has tried to obtain her files from social services, but was told by first county she lived in that they had been destroyed.
She does not understand why no action was taken by the police even though her abuser initially admitted to sexually abusing her.
Corrina adds that she now realises the foster parents probably knew she had been abused by her biological father. She believes this may be the reason why she was the victim of sexual abuse by the foster father.