Paul-David asks ‘How are we going to help children who can’t verbalise they are being abused?’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Paul-David still bears physical and mental scars from the abuse and extreme cruelty he was subjected to by people who were supposed to care for him.
As a small child, he couldn’t explain in words what was happening to him, but he says ‘If just one adult had taken notice of me maybe my suffering would have been shorter lived’.
Paul-David’s mother was a teenager when she gave birth to him, and his father was much older. His parents did not live together and when he was very young, he and his younger sibling were sent to live with their father.
When his father went to work, he left Paul-David in a locked room. Children's services became aware of this and sent Paul-David to a residential religious house.
As soon as Paul-David arrived, the members of the religious community began to abuse and humiliate him. They made him strip naked and prostrate himself in front of a religious statue. The members of the religious community did this to him several times. ‘I don’t know why I was punished and humiliated like this’ he says, adding that he was under the age of five when it happened.
After a while, Paul-David was moved to a children's home run by an elderly woman and two other individuals, Sue and Jane. These two women were also sadistic abusers, particularly one, who he says ‘had the most hatred and venom for me’.
Paul-David describes the first incident of abuse, which he says ‘plays like a movie in my mind … puts a shadow on my whole life. It’s the one that sticks most in my mind’.
On the night of this incident, Sue and Jane tore him from his bed, took him downstairs to a freezing cold room and stripped him. He recalls with distress the memory that ‘they both had canes, which were frayed at the ends’. Sue and Jane hit him repeatedly with their canes on his genitals.
Paul-David continues ‘They were coaxing me into saying swear words … I didn’t know what they were making me say, but when I did say the words, the whipping started again’. Again, the physical abuse was directed at his genitals.
Sue and Jane verbally abused him, dragged him to the sink, poured cold water on him and put soap in his mouth. ‘I remember the horrible taste as they pulled it out of my mouth and it got stuck’ he says.
This extreme abuse occurred several times. Paul-David remembers one of them saying to him ‘You’re not a big man are you … you’ll never be a big man will you?’, and other derogatory comments about his genitals.
Another member of staff was equally cruel to him, and would sit beside him in the bath and threaten to cut off his penis with a cooking knife.
Paul-David was often upset when he was at school. Looking back, he says, ‘I think I was having emotional meltdowns’. He remembers that he wanted to be close to his teacher and longed for him to be like a dad. ‘I would break down in tears in front of him, but I didn’t have the language to say what was wrong’ he says. But his teacher told him ‘Stop crying, pull your socks up’.
He made a plan to run away, which a teacher heard about, and reported to the home.
When he got back, he was given a freezing cold bath, and made to parade naked up and down the corridor. ‘The memory of that is another thing that wakes me up at night’ he says. He was then separated from the other children and only allowed meagre rations.
Paul-David felt that all the adults in his life branded him a trouble-maker and a fantasist. The social worker who visited him every couple of months asked him why he was telling so many lies, and his father hit him for telling lies when he went to him for weekend visits.
He endured terrible abuse in the home for about four years, until Sue and Jane and the individual who ran the home suddenly disappeared and were replaced by different houseparents. Paul-David says ‘It suddenly felt like someone had turned a light on … there was hugging … we got pocket money’.
When Paul-David was 11, he was sent to live with his father. Paul-David had to care for him. His father was verbally and psychologically abusive towards him.
Paul-David finished school before he was 16 years old, found a job and moved in with a family he knew.
‘I parked what happened in the children’s home to the back of my mind’ he says. ‘I kept myself busy and I loved working.’ But when he was in his early 20s, he began to experience anxiety, panic attacks and nightmares.
He experiences vivid flashbacks of images from that first terrible episode of abuse in the second children’s home. There have been times when he has been unable to leave the house.
He has felt self-loathing and confusion about his sexuality, and finds sexual relations difficult. He has scars on his genitals and still suffers pain in this area from the abuse.
Paul-David would like to see more funding for children's services and support networks for teachers to discuss concerns about children and direct them to appropriate help. He thinks we need a change in the attitude towards children in the care system, and that children need to be educated about abuse and how to keep themselves safe.
He emphasises how important it is to listen to children and believe them. He says ‘If one adult had believed me, if one had taken notice of me … then maybe my suffering would not have gone on for so long’.
Paul-David was referred for counselling, which he found very helpful. He has a supportive and understanding partner. ‘I have always felt my life doesn’t much matter but it does matter’ he says.