My piece is based around victims of the care system, I decided to call my piece "A Little Secret: A radio documentary on the victims of the care system", this is because the phrase 'let's keep it our little secret' is commonly used within abuse because the abuser does not want to be found out.
I came about this title because during my research I discovered a lot of things about people saying about it being a secret, and the victim was always scared to talk about it because it was a secret and the abuser told them not to.
Via research I have discovered some shocking findings. Based on research conducted by York University and the NSPCC they discovered that one in every hundred children living in care is abused every year in Britain. This study, which is the first to uncover and look at local authority records on abuse in foster and residential care also found out that on average there are between 450 and 550 cases of proven abuse every year in foster care and between 250 and 300 cases of confirmed abuse a year in residential care. Another shocking fact is that in residential care the rate of substantiated abuse claims are much higher than for foster families, with the average being between two and three proven cases per 100 children.
The study also found out that most abuse or neglect within foster care (more than 88%) is performed by carers. As well as this, more than a third of these cases the victim was physically harmed and 11% were sexually abused.
Based around an article on The Telegraph, researchers in University College London (UCL) asked more than 1,500 carers at 92 homes across the country to say if they had seen or been involved in, troubling behaviour in the past three months. It came about that abuse and neglect has been present in nine out of 10 nursing and care homes. It says within the article that the findings were described as 'worrying' and that at least some abuse or neglect was identified in 91 out of the 92 care homes. As well as this, verbal abuse was reported by 5% of the respondents and physical abuse was reported by 1%. The article also states that more than one quarter of the staff said that they or colleagues occasionally made the residents wait for care, whilst one in five of them said residents were not given enough time to eat food.
I also searched videos and watched stories based around real life cases of abuse, one that shocked me was this short clip on 'This Morning' which was based around a case of abuse in an elderly care home.
The Guardian posted an article back in 2014 about Samantha Morton, a Bafta and Gloden Globe winning actor, telling her story of her abuse during her childhood in foster care and residential homes. Many quotes from this interview stuck with me and brought up thoughts surrounding my abuse. Three quotes stuck with me:
“To me when you are abused, sexually abused, it is a life sentence, it stays with you forever, or physically abused, it does stay with you forever. “ “Traumas a funny one, because its like grief, you can be fine, 4 or 5 years then it can come back and hits you like it happened the day before.”
“Or what’s considered norm, its how things are manipulated, and children are still growing, their brains are still growing, so they are manipulated into thinking it is normal.”
Those quotes speak for themselves. It hits you. It's true, everyday you do not wake up haunted by it, but it haunts you occasionally and when it does it hurts, it exhausts you, you cry, you think why me and then you just have to pick yourself up and carry on like anyone else.
