Freda has always made sure her children have the happy experiences she missed out on as a child
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Freda recounts the eight years she spent in a children’s home, where she suffered cruelty and emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
She says ‘There was no love … no arm around you. My children will never feel what I felt, ever’.
Freda was born with a number of serious medical conditions. When she was a baby she was placed in a local authority home, which had a unit for children who were extremely unwell or disabled.
Freda describes how upsetting and difficult it was to grow up surrounded by other children who were so ill. She says that sometimes ‘you went to bed and woke up and one of them had died’.
No one talked to the children or gave them any counselling or support when this happened.
Freda remembers people coming in to look for children to adopt, but they mostly only looked at the ‘normal’ ones. The ill and disabled children were not allowed to mix with the healthy children and she describes living a very withdrawn and solitary existence. She was not sent to school.
The children’s home was staffed mainly by females, who operated a harsh punishment regime. Freda says ‘If you played up like any normal child they would pin you down’. Sometimes they were so rough with her that she needed hospital treatment.
There was a male caretaker at the home, who offered to keep an eye on Freda when she went out to ride her bike. He used these times when she was away from other people as an opportunity to sexually abuse her. She thinks she was about five years old when this started.
Each child had their own bedroom which they were locked in at night, in the dark. The caretaker had a set of keys and sometimes he would let himself into Freda’s room and sexually abuse her.
The caretaker would touch her, and ‘do whatever he wanted to do’. Freda says ‘I was eight when I left the home, and I wasn’t a virgin’. She remembers him telling her ‘You’re not going to make it out of here alive … nobody wants the damaged ones’.
Freda never told anyone about the abuse. She says ‘No one would have believed me anyway … he was the adult, they would take his word over mine’.
Sometimes Freda would self-harm, to the extent that she had to be admitted to hospital. She says the staff in hospital were kind and caring, and she felt safe there away from the sexual abuse and harsh treatment at the home.
She escaped the sexual abuse when she was eight years old, and was moved to live with foster parents. She could not read or write, because she had had no education. She didn’t know how to climb a flight of stairs, because she had never been allowed to go upstairs where the ‘normal’ children lived.
Freda describes how at first she found it hard to adjust to family life after the children’s home. She was very frightened of the male foster carer for a while. The caretaker who abused her had been the only man she had known up to this point, and she was apprehensive about what her foster father would want from her.
But the placement with foster parents was a positive experience, they became like Freda’s family and she is still close to them.
Freda started going to school, but found this very difficult. She did not know how to socialise and she was bullied.
Freda says she has only recently started to talk about her experience. ‘This is hard ... I’ve held it in deep for a long time.’ She worries that talking about it might upset the families of the people who abused her, and also that she may not be believed.
She continues to find it difficult to trust men. She is afraid of the dark, suffers with nightmares and still self-harms.
As an adult, Freda wonders if the other staff at the children’s home knew that the caretaker was abusing her. She often had blood stains in her underwear, but no one asked about this.
She says ‘Now I have my own children I can see there were a lot of red flags people could have acted on. I remember when I was in hospital I would be like a normal child, playing and happy. I never wanted to go back’.
Freda believes that children should not be segregated because of their conditions, and ideally they should not be placed in homes, where ‘anything can happen to a child’. She doesn’t think children’s homes would ever be nice places, but says they could be a lot less cold towards children. ‘I was made to feel it was my fault I was in there’ she says.
Freda has a very supportive partner who encouraged her to come to the Truth Project. She finds comfort in ensuring her children feel cared for and happy. ‘Their Christmases and birthdays will not be like mine’ she says.