Silas says ‘People don’t realise how many men are in jail because of what happened to them in care’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Silas suffered abuse throughout his childhood, at home and in the care system.
When he was about 12 years old, he was referred to a psychiatric hospital where he was at the mercy of a sadistic doctor who drugged and sexually abused him.
Silas was born in the 1960s and grew up in the Traveller community. In a written account of his experience, he describes suffering appalling violence at the hands of his father. He was placed in a care home where he was abused by staff and an older boy.
The care home referred him to a psychiatric hospital, which aimed to correct ‘problems of conduct, character and emotional disorders’. He remembers being taken to a big stone building and left there.
Silas relates that two or three times a week he ‘was taken upstairs and this man would put an injection in my arm’. He says that when he woke up his trousers were always undone.
Looking back, Silas believes the drug he was given wiped out his memory, and he describes being kept almost as a zombie.
He continues ‘I used to cry a lot and say I want to leave’. When staff from the care home came to visit he asked them to take him away, but, he says ‘They left me there’.
As an adult, Silas has spent time in prison and he believes that most people have no idea how many men end up in custody because of their experiences in the care system. He feels it is particularly difficult for men to say they have been raped.
Silas suffers distressing flashbacks of the abuse and has been diagnosed with PTSD. He finds it difficult to trust anyone, particularly people in authority, and he does not feel he can ever have a family.
He has tried, without success, to obtain his health and care records to try and understand why he was referred to the psychiatric unit.
Silas understands that the doctor is now deceased and will not be held to account for the abuse he perpetrated. He says the abuser ‘has left a lot of people with mixed up lives’ and he wants others to know what was done to him and others as children.
He says ‘I was a kid then. Who would believe a kid … 53 years on, still trying to get someone to believe me’.