Content warning: this article contains details of child abuse that some readers may find distressing.
Louise Casey’s report on the UK grooming gangs is, rightly, at the forefront of political and media attention – but the suffering of children who are abused by their families in their own homes deserves the same level of attention from politicians, the media and the child protection authorities.
The neglect of childhood abuse survivors is a hidden endemic that has festered at the core of British society for decades. Fuelled by instances of institutional negligence, disbelief, political short-termism, burying of heads in the sand, and a culture of victim blaming and passing the buck, this is a problem that has been allowed to continue unchecked from at least the early 1970s to the present day.
Abused as a child
I was born in the 1970s to unmarried parents and suffered 16 years of continuous violent physical, sexual, and psychological abuse at the hands of my ‘mother’. Daily violent beatings and in house torture sessions were the norm for as long as I can remember.
I was whipped with a plastic belt until I bled. I suffered broken bones, attempted strangulation, a skull fracture, bruising and other injuries. I was pushed down the stairs and violently assaulted both in public and in private. I was starved, kept off school for weeks at a time and locked in the house to stop me from telling anyone. And I was repeatedly exposed to my ‘mother’s’ fantasies about murdering children from when I was only five or six years old.
Independent reports of my abusers’ crimes were made to the authorities when I was a young child and the abuse I suffered was repeatedly witnessed by relatives, neighbours, other children’s mothers and members of the public, but no steps were taken to protect me from harm. The issue was simply ignored.
I began to report the abuse myself from the age of 11, but I was met with continual disbelief by the child protection authorities. My social worker buried the matter by dismissing me as devious, naughty, manipulative, and unpleasant. As a terrified and vulnerable 14-year-old girl, the police threatened me with arrest. My social worker and the police alike behaved as if they hated me and made me feel that I would never be believed.
The neglect I experienced from both the local authority and the police continued after I ran away at 16 years old. The police tried to make me return to my abuser’s home and when I refused, I was abandoned, while still legally a child, to survive as best as I could. This led to homelessness, poverty, hunger, the sexual exploitation of me and a 14-year-old friend by a paedophile ring of older men; and a cycle of renewed trauma, suffering, deprivation and vulnerability to further abuse that continues to this day.
Political, economic and judicial institutions have failed me and other survivors like me.
Institutional abuse in adulthood
As an adult, I have suffered continued neglect, abuse and cover-ups by the same authorities who failed me so badly as a child. The local authority has repeatedly refused to apologise or compensate me for failing to protect me from harm.
The police have caused even more harm by refusing to arrest or even question my abuser. They have ‘lost’ video evidence (which miraculously reappeared when the information commissioner intervened), have failed to comply with further subject access requests, have blocked my ability to access compensation by refusing to prosecute my abuser, have mocked and sneered at my understandable distress and have attempted to undermine my integrity with accusations of gold digging. They have let me waste decades of my life pursuing a battle for justice (and my own survival) that they had – and have – no intention of ever allowing me to win.
The long-term effects of such abuse and continued neglect can only be described as the repeated ruination of survivors’ lives. Justice, compensation, employment, the means to survive, and even trauma-informed health care are routinely denied, while politicians and governments dismiss assisting such survivors as an issue of no importance. Boris Johnson’s notorious description of non-recent child abuse investigations as money “spaffed up the wall” exemplifies such dismissal.
The result is that the children who somehow ‘survive’ into adulthood are ultimately left with no way to exist beyond submission to the cruelties and abuses of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which does nothing but compound their suffering through continued blaming and shaming. Survivors endure further unchecked abuses of their human rights, poverty, stigmatisation, social exclusion and a devastatingly destructive, profoundly retraumatising lack of opportunities for escape.
Survivors deserve more from our government
The powerlessness and suffering of survivors’ childhoods is thus re-experienced throughout their adult lives. No actual help, or even recognition, is offered. Instead, only more punishment because the government, politicians and institutions up and down the country continue to let them down. This has a devastating personal impact for survivors, as they once more find themselves abandoned, neglected and abused on the grounds that the situation is somehow their fault and not the fault of those who have failed them for their entire lives.
Now we have the Labour government’s proposals for disability benefit reform. Irrespective of whether the reforms are implemented in full, when Liz Kendall says some claimants are “taking the mickey”, and when Keir Starmer gives a statement saying the benefits bill is “blighting our society”, this rhetoric inflicts fresh and devastating harm on survivors of childhood abuse. Yet again they are left feeling humiliated, disbelieved and blamed for their situation. Reassessments, conditionality and sanctions by the DWP cause further trauma and renewed distress to survivors by making them feel even more distrusted, disbelieved, and punished for being a victim of abuse.
Who, though, is ‘taking the mickey’ out of whom? Survivors of childhood abuse who want nothing but a chance to finally live – or the governments, politicians, and institutions who have systematically blocked, failed, excluded and re-abused such survivors for the whole of their lives?
This government must finally acknowledge the elephant in the room and give survivors the long-overdue resources that they need to try and build a life after abuse; an abuse that may never have occurred at all – and which would not still be occurring today – if the government and institutions alike did not allow victims to suffer such destructive and ultimately pointless neglect.
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