Maximus says ‘At night I used to cry, knowing what was going to happen’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Maximus is still greatly distressed by memories of the sexual abuse he suffered in children’s homes and on the streets.
‘We were taken into care because we needed to be cared for, not raped and abused’ he says.
Maximus was abandoned by his mother in the 1950s. His earliest memory is being dropped off at a care home. On his arrival, he says, ‘I got a beating … I didn’t know what I’d done wrong’.
This was a foretaste of the regime operated by the female staff who ran the home. They seemed to have a particular dislike of the boys. Maximus recalls ‘Every night after tea the boys had to line up and take their trousers down and were beaten … the girls were never touched’.
There were no male staff in the house where Maximus lived, but one night a man came and took Maximus from his bed. He was taken to a room where he was blindfolded and stripped. He could hear adult voices and then men began to touch him. They tried to anally rape him.
Maximus was about six when this happened. They did not manage to rape him that time, but they did so on future occasions.
Maximus recalls ‘I used to lay in that bed at night shaking. It hurts me now that I was so relieved when it was another boy they took’.
Maximus tried to talk to one of the housemothers about the abuse. She dismissed him, saying ‘Little boys who tell lies go to bad places’.
He was happier at the next care home he lived in because the staff were not so cruel. However, he was still exposed to sexual abusers while he was there. Once a group of children were taken on an outing to see a television show being recorded, and one of the performers followed him into the toilets and molested him.
He reported this to the housemaster, but no action was apparently taken.
Not long after, his mother visited him for the first time since she abandoned him. ‘I didn’t even know who she was’ he says. She arranged for Maximus to visit her for a weekend. She met him at the station and took him to her boyfriend’s place.
Maximus says ‘That night he sexually abused me. She sat there and did nothing’.
The next day he went back to the children’s home, but did not tell anyone what had happened.
Throughout all the years that Maximus was in care, no social worker ever visited him. Like many of the other children, he often ran away, but no officer ever asked why. ‘They just wanted to take you back’ he says.
He describes leaving care at the age of 16, with just a train ticket and some change. At a city station he was befriended by other boys who had been in the care system. He says ‘They knew the ropes … they knew what they had to do to survive’, adding that meant ‘sell your body.’
For the next few years, Maximus lived on the streets with other boys. They were preyed on by sexual abusers, but he says they tried to stick together and avoid the men who were notorious for supplying boys to paedophile gangs. Sometimes he encountered abusers who were well known or held positions of high office.
In his later life, Maximus has been married and had children, but he has not been able to sustain a relationship with a partner. He says ‘I don’t know what love is. I never had any, and so it is hard for me to give it’.
He suffers from flashbacks and has what he calls ‘dark memory days’. He has depression and has attempted suicide, and describes feeling dirty and ashamed. He cries a lot and says he feels safer staying at home.
Maximus feels strongly that social services should keep in touch with children who have been placed in care, make unannounced visits, and talk to children without care staff being present. He is angry about ‘cover-ups’ of high-profile abusers.
He would like to see more rigorous vetting of staff who work in care homes, and feels that smaller children’s homes are likely to be safer than large ones.
Maximus has had therapy. He uses social media to raise awareness of child sexual abuse and to warn young people of the dangers they face living on the streets.