Kerry says there should be better support for children who have to be young carers
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
As a child, Kerry took on caring responsibilities for her father.
The pressure caused her to run away and she was taken into care where she was raped by a member of staff.
When Kerry was a young child, her mother left the family home, leaving her and her sister with their father. He suffered from a serious chronic illness and was a wheelchair user.
Kerry describes her father as ‘pig-headed’ because he would not accept any care or support, so she had to act as his carer. She often missed school because of this.
Kerry remembers feeling a lot of anger and resentment as a child about the situation she was in. When she was 10, she became so frustrated that she ran away for a night.
When she was found, social services asked her to choose between going home or living somewhere else. She says she didn’t want to leave home but she really wanted help with all her tasks. However, no support was offered, so she said she didn’t want to go back, and was placed in care.
Kerry was sent to an assessment centre and was told she would only be there for a short amount of time. She describes how strange it felt adjusting to having no responsibilities, with all her meals cooked for her, and this affected her behaviour.
‘I felt so light that I became naughty’ she says.
After several months, Kerry was told she was going to be permanently placed in a children’s home. She remembers how angry she was about this. She asked to see her father but because of his disability it was difficult for him to travel to see her.
She liked the home she was sent to at first, but she was transferred to another one after she went out one evening. Kerry says this seemed very unfair because she left the home to find one of her friends who was missing. She had not been in trouble before, and was shocked and frightened when she was told she had to leave because staff could not control her.
When she arrived at the new home, she says, it immediately felt like a detention centre. She had to take her clothes off and bathe in front of a female staff member. All the doors had locks and the windows had bars, and the young people had to wear uniforms.
‘I thought I was in prison, and I was’ she says.
She was allowed to speak to her father once a week, with the telephone on loudspeaker in the matron’s room.
Kerry became so unhappy and angry with her situation that she started to rebel more. During one of her lessons she ‘lashed out’, and was restrained and taken from the classroom by two members of staff.
She was left alone in a room with a metal door until a male member of staff, Mr Smith, came in. He said to her ‘Young ladies who make a fuss must be punished’ and he then raped her, vaginally, orally and anally.
During the next supervised phone call with her father, Kerry shouted out what had happened to her. The matron ended the call, and over the next few weeks Kerry was repeatedly questioned about what she had said. Mr Smith denied the rape and called Kerry a liar.
She didn’t know this at the time, but after the phone call Kerry’s father took steps to remove her from the home. About a month later she was placed to live with relatives.
Kerry describes a happy, settled period of time. Her father told her when she moved ‘You’re safe now’, but no one ever spoke to her about what had happened.
She still experiences frequent flashbacks of the assault and suffers with anger and depression. She left school with no qualifications and was sexually promiscuous for a time.
As an adult, Kerry requested access to her social services files, but she found a lot of detail was missing. She would like to see better record-keeping so that children who have been in care can find all their personal information when they are adults. Kerry feels this could help a person ‘make sense of their life’.
Most importantly, she wants young carers to be well-supported, offered regular breaks and an opportunity to talk.