‘I used to believe it was all my fault’ Kadie says, ‘but the older I get I realise that the system failed me’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Kadie’s parents were drug addicts and she was taken into care, where she was sexually abused.
She says it took her years to understand the abuse wasn’t something that she ‘deserved’.
Kadie and her sister were placed in a children’s home because their parents could not look after them. She says ‘Most of the other kids in the home were boys older than me … I learnt how to fight at an early age’.
A man called Lou, who was the husband of one of the care staff, was always around the home.
One day Kadie was outside with him, helping him clean his car. She thinks she was about six years old. She found a photo that she thought she wasn’t meant to see.
She now knows it was pornography, but at the time she asked him what the people were doing. He told her words to the effect that it was what happens to girls ‘who don’t do as they are told’.
Kadie chooses not to share details of the sexual abuse, but says this was when it started. She adds that her parents had died of drug overdoses and been in prison before they died, and says ‘I remember him telling me I would end up like my mum if I did not do as he told me’.
Lou continued sexually abusing Kadie until she was in her early teens, when she left the children’s home for a foster placement. During that time, two older boys in the home also sexually abused her. They were both close to Lou, and she thinks he encouraged them because they made the same threats to her about how she would end up like her mum.
Kadie continues that as a young adult ‘Sadly I became mixed up in drugs and ended up in rehab’. During her treatment, she says she talked a little about the abuse. Soon after, she contacted her foster father and told him about it.
He had been a senior member of staff at the home and he immediately guessed who the abuser was, but then asked Kadie not to tell anyone. She says ‘That was the end of it. I never told anyone else’.
Kadie says ‘I know the abuse has had and is still having a major effect on my life … I never felt I was worth anything as a person’. She says it has taken her years to accept she was not to blame for the abuse or that she deserved it.
Having been told by the abuser she would not be believed if she told anyone what he was doing, she feels angry that when she did tell someone she thought would listen, he said she should not say anything.
Kadie is married with children but says that her difficulties with intimacy have caused problems in her relationship with her husband.
She emphasises how important it is for children in care to have ways to report concerns, to know that they will be listened to and not made to feel they are worthless.
Kadie says she knows there must be many more people who were let down by the care system. Sometimes she wishes she had the courage to sue the social services department that was responsible for her.
‘I know money would not take away the abuse and damage that has been done, but I do wonder sometimes if it would make me feel a bit better about myself if I actually did something about it’ she says.