Liv says when she was a child, ‘I would do anything to get someone to care for me’
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Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Liv experienced sexual abuse by two different women and one man, all of whom were supposed to care for her.
She felt abandoned when she left the care system with no support, at the age of 16.
Liv has obtained her care records and knows she was taken into foster care when she was a baby, because her mother was not able to look after her. When she was about three years old, her foster carers adopted her.
She adored her adoptive father but sadly he died a few years later. Her adoptive mother was very cruel. Liv remembers the night before her first day at school, she felt very anxious. Her mother got cross and threatened to put her in a home. The next day when Liv went to school, she thought she was in care.
Liv attended a convent school. One of the nuns who taught there started keeping Liv behind when the other children went to play. This nun sexually abused Liv, touching her inside her knickers. Liv didn’t like it, but was terrified of the nun.
She was also physically abused by the Mother Superior, who beat her, once with such force that she broke the wooden implement she was using.
Around the same time, Liv’s adoptive mother began to touch her and behave inappropriately, putting her legs round her. They shared a bed together and Liv says that at the time, ‘I almost enjoyed the attention’ and it wasn’t until later that she realised ‘it was a sexual thing’.
She thinks this went on for a few months until one night her mother said ‘We are not going to be doing that anymore’. Liv remembers ‘I felt really rejected … I didn’t know what it was. And I missed it’.
Two years later, after a family bereavement, they moved house. Liv began wetting the bed and often went to school smelling of urine, in unwashed clothes. Her mother began leaving her alone, and became more threatening towards her.
Liv once ran to a neighbour saying her mother was going to hurt her.
When Liv was 12, her mother met a man and started going out more. By the time Liv was 14, she had attempted suicide twice, and had been put on prescription medication.
As a teenager, Liv says she became quite promiscuous. ‘Anything to get someone to care about me’ she comments.
One day, when Liv was 15, a social worker arrived at her school with her possessions in two black bin bags, and told her that her adoptive mother didn’t want her anymore. Liv was taken to a children’s home, but she ran away after a few months.
When social services asked if she wanted to be fostered, she said ‘Yes … I just need a mum and dad to sort me out’.
Liv was given a placement with a couple in their late 20s. Almost immediately, she felt uncomfortable with the way the foster father looked at her, and she reported this to her social worker. However, she was told there was nowhere else for her to go.
The foster father began sexually abusing Liv when she was 16. It began with kissing and escalated to penetrative sex. Liv says she ‘allowed it’ because she thought she would be thrown out and have nowhere to go.
Liv left the placement when she became pregnant. Her foster father said that if she told social services he was the father, he and his wife would take care of the baby. Liv did not want this, so she had an abortion which she regrets to this day.
She left care at the age of 16. She describes being in a bedsit ‘with nothing to call my own and no one to support me’.
Liv did go to the police to report the abuse by the foster father, but they said because she hadn’t said ‘no’ it was viewed as a consensual relationship.
She suffers from depression, PTSD and other mental health disorders. She says her experiences have made her over-protective of her children and this has had an adverse impact on them, although she has a good relationship with them.
Liv says that children need to be believed and listened to. She adds that social services should be very careful about how they match children in foster placements.
She is engaging with a therapy programme, which is helping her. But she says ‘I still don’t know who I am’.