Elaine says ‘I feel broken … like everyone else is functioning well and I’m not’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Throughout her chaotic early life, Elaine suffered neglect and sexual abuse from family members and others outside her home.
When she tried to speak out, she was not believed, but labelled ‘bad’ and often returned to the places where she was being abused.
Elaine says that social services were involved in her life ever since she can remember. She recalls that as a young child, when she was living with her dad, step-mum and sibling, she was asked by a social worker to show, using dolls, if she had been sexually abused.
She was in fact sexually abused by a friend of her father, who came into her room at night, and also a babysitter. In another incident, when she was nine years old, she was ‘picked up off the street’ by a teenage boy and sexually abused near a railway track.
She says her mother wasn’t present in her early life and she only knew her as a stranger who she would occasionally visit. She remembers being asked in court who she wanted to live with and she chose her dad. Despite the sexual abuse, she says she felt it was better to stick with what she knew, and she loved her father.
But at home with him, her step-mum was physically abusive and beat Elaine’s sibling so badly he was removed by social services. Elaine went to school dirty and unwashed, with her shoes falling off and frequently covered in bruises. She was also bullied at school, but no one ever questioned her about her life.
When she was 11 years old Elaine asked to live with her mother and her stepfather, where her brother was also living by this time. Soon after she arrived, she was left in the care of her stepfather’s nan for nine months while her mother and step-dad went to ‘learn how to run a pub’.
When they came back, the family moved to a new house together and her mother had a baby. At this point, her step-dad began to sexually abuse Elaine on a regular basis.
Elaine told a friend at school about the abuse, and the friend’s mother called her mum. Elaine describes being taken to see social services by her mum. She was made to sit in a room with two social workers, along with her brother and her step-dad and reprimanded for ‘making up stories’.
Elaine was not asked whether what she had said was true, but lectured about the seriousness of making unfounded allegations – she remembers a comment – ‘innocent people can be sent to prison’.
She was returned home where the abuse continued. She says by this time she was smoking and drinking and her behaviour deteriorated. In her early teens she was taken into care, but here she suffered more sexual abuse from the foster father, so she asked to go back to her mother.
This threw her back into the cycle of sexual abuse from her step-dad, that caused her to behave in a way that her mother found so challenging that she used to lock Elaine in her room from 4pm in the afternoon until the next morning. This did not prevent her step-dad from continuing to sexually abuse her – he used a screwdriver to remove the lock and get into her room.
Eventually, Elaine was taken into care – this time to a children’s home. Here, she reported the abuse by the babysitter and by her step-dad. The babysitter was arrested and charged, but not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. No action was ever taken against her step-dad; her mother strongly denied the abuse had taken place.
Elaine relates two more experiences of sexual abuse that occurred when she ran away from care and stayed in a hostel overnight.
She has experienced serious mental health difficulties during her life, and spent time in hospital. She says that she was using drugs but the psychiatric help prevented her from becoming an addict. She was classed as having complex trauma but she did not receive therapeutic help. She did attend a group, which she says was helpful, but it was discontinued due to lack of funding.
Elaine describes feeling ‘hurt, angry, abandoned, rejected … I always feel different, I eternally feel bad’. She has attempted suicide on more than one occasion and lost a limb as a result.
She feels she was failed by social services on many occasions. She believes that if they had questioned her more thoroughly in her early childhood and later on, she would have spoken about the abuse. But she says ‘social services didn’t help me. They blamed me. They didn’t protect or save me’.
Elaine says that we should listen to children and when a child tells social services something has happened, they must respond appropriately and proportionately. She would like to see more therapy available for children in care.