by Jenny Molloy
Hope and her brothers . . . felt unable to cope any longer and took themselves off to the police station . . .
Wards of court . . .
The parents’ . . . impossible behaviour . . . serious drink problems . . .
Hope is likely to be living at Chesterfields until she is eighteen.
As secure and supportive surroundings as possible . . .
No likelihood of the children returning home to live with their parents . . .
Hope being reported for criminal damage . . . close to her brothers . . . would like to go to a family with ‘little kids in it’.
They thought they would be fostered . . .
They have a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ idea about fostering . . .
. . . terminating parental access . . .
. . . decided not to make a request to fostering and adoption . . .
. . . psychotherapeutic help . . .
. . . high-risk . . .
Hope has not had the childhood she should have had and she was . . . badly let down by her own parents . . .
We have not been able to make up for what Hope’s parents have failed to do . . .
Until she can see that, if nothing else, professional people know their limitations and can face the pain this stirs up, there can be little hope that she will feel that she can truly trust anybody . . .
Holding out hope . . .
Now I knew. Even more so, now I knew and understood. Finally, for the first time in my life, I knew who I was – and I knew why.
Now I knew who I was, I needed to change some things.
I resigned from the Citizens Advice Bureau. The old me had become target-driven. I’d been driven by money and career progression. While I’d loved much of what I’d done and enjoyed earning money to pay the bills, I needed a new start. These were the people I’d worked and got drunk with. Just being there felt like the old me and I didn’t like that person. It wasn’t me anymore.
On the day I left, I called Danny.
‘So,’ he said, ‘how does it feel?’
‘Like, oh – my – God amazing,’ I answered.
A new start – but as what? I’d left my job with nothing to replace it. The answer came, as so many things do these days, via Facebook. A message popped up from Carol, someone I knew through work. Carol was thinking of opening a night shelter for the homeless and I messaged her and we got talking.
She asked me what I was up to.
‘I’ve just given notice.’
‘Do you want a job?’
‘All right then.’
It was that simple. I had to take quite a pay cut. I’d be paid less than half of my normal salary, which made things a bit hairy, financially speaking.
We persuaded six of our local Kent churches to fund us. We had just enough resources to provide shelter for four nights a week, for the four coldest months of the year. We ‘advertised’ via the police, who often dealt with long- and short-term homeless, and they promised to make sure that anyone who needed shelter knew what we were up to.
The plan was, starting every Friday night at 8pm and ending Tuesday morning, we’d go to one of the churches and convert it into a sleeping area, bringing hot dinners and breakfasts, as well as donated clothes and anything else we thought might be useful.
Come the first day, we were really nervous. It was a ridiculously small project and it was all volunteer-led. The local council didn’t think there was a homeless problem but, of course, if you’re not looking, you won’t see it. We wondered whether anyone would actually come.
A trickle became a bit of a flood, as two dozen people arrived in quick succession and eventually we had over thirty cold and hungry people to deal with. The night flew past as we cooked, sorted clothes and spoke to everyone who came in.
People like me. People who had been abused and neglected, then lost and forgotten. I was already able to appreciate how lucky I was to have been in care until I was eighteen – not to have fallen through the cracks.
The next morning we cooked them breakfast. We buttered toast, fried eggs and bacon. When I said, ‘Come and get it!’ no one moved. ‘What’s wrong?’
One red-headed man in his thirties held up a shaking hand.
Without their morning hit of alcohol, they couldn’t hold their cup of coffee, let alone eat and keep down breakfast. Carol and I cradled their coffees as they couldn’t get the hot liquid anywhere near their mouths. The best we could do was give them a packed lunch and hand the building back to the church before lunchtime.
The police appreciated us keeping these people off the streets. It gave them more time to do other things. They’d call up and say something like, ‘We’ve just seen Bill [a long-term homeless man] by the town clock but he’s impossible. We can’t control him at all. Bites, kicks, the lot.’
I’d go along with Carol and greet Bill with a cheery hello and a promise of a hot meal and a dry bed for the night and he’d come with us, quiet as a lamb. The police couldn’t believe it. But it’s simple, really. People like me, like Bill, like most people in this book, who’ve suffered abuse and neglect, can’t handle people in positions of power and authority. I’ve learned to recognise this and my urges to run away, shout abuse or fight have been reduced to nothing, while poor old Bill sees in the police the countless people who’ve beaten him up and abused him since he was a child.
He was so unwell. Not only did we get Bill to come and see us, we talked him into going into detox after a few cups of tea.
We got thirty-two homeless people through one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record.
It felt amazing.
Then we managed to get more than a dozen long-term homeless people housed. People who’d been on the streets for a few days or weeks tended to be easier to deal with and were more motivated to sort out a permanent address than the long-termers, those who had forgotten what it was like to have a home.
I went to check up on one recently re-housed man and found a volunteer was already there, looking sheepish.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked before realising.
They were together.
‘I never expected to play Cilla Black when I started to work here,’ I said. They are still together today!
Like many people who have suffered abuse and/or neglect, I wanted to do something to help people like me. I had my work with the homeless charity but I wanted to do more. I wanted to get closer to the people who found themselves in the position I found myself in as a child – as a ward of the state.
My chance came when a friend told me about an opening at an independent fostering agency and I decided to go for it. I was plagued with fears about my ability – sometimes I was still overtaken by feelings that I was a fraud and was worried that I’d be caught out and exposed as a useless kid from care, who didn’t deserve a place in society, who wasn’t fit to be employed or respected as a professional. But, thanks to the love I received from the people who cared about me, I shoved these feelings aside and went for it.
There is something to be said for care leavers working in care. We’ve been through it and, if we’re in a position to apply, then we’re mentally robust enough to survive the job. We’ve done a lot of work on ourselves and our strengths and weaknesses. I get goosebumps when I meet people in the care system or care leavers who say they want to do outreach work or foster care. Kids in care really listen to adults who’ve been in care. They can be a valuable mentor because they can really say: ‘I was in your position.’ They can identify and deal with the tough questions kids ask. One young care leaver turned carer, a young man, had lived a wild life and a child he was caring for asked him if he’d had fun at the time.
‘Yes, I did,’ he replied. ‘But I also went to a lot of funerals and I’m still visiting my old friends in prison.’
Getting the job at the independent fostering agency really was the culmination of all my hard work – finally to have the opportunity to use my own past to help others in the same position.
&nbs
p; I really have come so far now. I have faced up to and dealt with my past. And I can accept the person I’ve become as a result. Not every day is perfect, of course, there are those lonely, grey days but that’s something we all have to face in life. Now I have the mechanisms in place to cope.
I know that I am and have been loved – even when I sank into alcoholism. People believed in me and loved me enough to get me through the darkness and into the light.
I know from my own experiences that love is so important for children in care. My children are so affectionate with each other. We tell each other that we love each other every single day. Yet my parents didn’t ever cuddle me and, as far as I could tell, they abhorred physical contact, even with each other. So where did my affection come from? From the people who showed me love in care, showed me that love was possible, that it was possible to give and receive love, and that love has the power to heal anyone.
LARS
I’m from a Scandinavian country and was trained there. It’s quite different from the UK. Students of social work have to work in a children’s home for at least three days each week. Just one day per week is spent at university. It takes four years to qualify. There’s a lot of reading and group work, most of which is reflective – analysing your own thoughts, behaviours and emotions that emerge as responses to what’s going on around you. This means that you have to spend a lot of time during those four years getting to know yourself extremely well. Of course, this is all supervised by a working social worker who assesses and guides you. It’s an extremely interesting and rewarding experience. You learn how to build up trust with someone, so that you can give something of your true self to making the relationship work.
In the UK, I’ve sometimes observed how social workers are told not to talk about their own experiences, which I think is silly. It’s good to make yourself vulnerable and this is critical in forging genuine relationships with children. In essence, we have to train the head, heart and hand (in terms of practical experience) to become a social worker. Too many people in the UK working in this sector are not confident in themselves. Everyone has their insecurities but maybe some social workers have insecurities that lead them to an attack-style – which leads the people we’re trying to help to attack back, most often with allegations of unfair treatment or abuse.
Reflective study made it clear to me where my insecurities lay – removing them from their natural unconscious state to somewhere I’m fully aware of them. This doesn’t happen in the UK and I think it needs to.
That is why, in the UK, there are guidelines for social workers and care home workers who want to hug the children they’re looking after. Or perhaps I should say – not hugging them. I’m referring to the ‘side hug’, a sideways reach-around over the shoulder with one arm, designed to avoid inappropriate body-to-body contact.
There are so many things that are wrong with this type of advice, I barely know where to begin. When I give advice to my social workers, I am conscious of their safety and say that we’ve got a certain style of working, ethos, value and belief, and the side hug is most definitely not part of it. You wouldn’t do that to your dog – why do it to a child? Only to protect yourself from a system that’s gone bonkers.
When I first arrived in the UK and found work (I was given a job within a week in south London, they were really desperate), I was allocated a mother who needed to go and see her kids who were in foster care. We were in London, they were on the south coast. So I said I’d drive her down. The kids had been taken into care because of her alcohol and drug addiction.
Just as I was about to head off, my manager told me, ‘You’ve got to take someone else with you. You can’t go on your own with the mother in the car. Those are our safeguard rules.’
I argued that it was ridiculous; I wasn’t worried about allegations because I wasn’t going to do anything for her to make allegations about. I said there was no way I wasn’t going to take this woman down to see her kids.
‘At least make sure she sits on the back seat,’ my manager replied.
I took her on my own, sitting next to me. We had only met twice but had a good relationship and trusted one another. These safeguard rules are only there to cover our backs. If anything, these rules are likely to worsen the relationships with the parents and children we work with by putting up barriers. In Scandinavia it was all about putting the child first, we never had to worry about this.
I had quickly established a relationship with the mother, who had many significant social and emotional issues, by being open and direct. I was unguarded, but not reckless. I kept her informed and made phone calls, trying to reassure her that I would keep her involved in her child’s care and that there would be no nasty surprises.
The trip was beautiful. Her boy was a huge football fan and his whole room was a shrine to Liverpool, all red and gold. I’d never seen anything like this before back home and we had a good laugh about it.
I also invited the mother to meetings at our office. A review officer gave me a hard time about her coming along with her family. It was all to do with the child’s wellbeing, I argued, so they should be here. The plan was for the mother’s family to take a holiday near where the kids were staying, so she could see them more easily for a few days. I had assumed that this was what everyone did but it was quickly made clear to me that this was not the case. I was also surprised when people at case conferences would look at me and say: This is your case, you have to make a decision.’
Again, I felt as though this was all about them covering their backs, so I’d say something like, ‘No, I don’t think so. We all need to make a decision here. I’d like to discuss with you and then we can decide how we want to go forward with this case.’
This job is all about listening to people without making assumptions, wanting them to be part of the process.
The care home I worked in when I first arrived in the UK was a wealthy residential institution that cared for children aged five to seventeen. I had to supervise their showering and cleaning at the end of the swimming session, which would be full of rough-and-tumble sort of play. The care home had it set up so that was entirely normal. There was no policy. We just had to be there to make sure no one got hurt.
I read children bedtime stories, sitting on the side of the bed – girls and boys. If he or she wants to give me a hug then that’s what they should get. After all the research into attachment theory, I can’t believe we’re denying warmth to the children who need it most.
All this is leading me to the story of Julius. Julius was a thirteen-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and he arrived in the UK as an unaccompanied asylum seeker. He was placed with one of our foster carers. He spoke English but it wasn’t that great.
I saw him a few weeks after dropping him off with the foster carers. I asked him how the placement was.
‘Good.’
‘So what’s good about it?’
Julius looked down at his feet. He wouldn’t say. I gave him time. This was a boy who’d seen his parents killed in front of him. He’d sustained serious injuries, been left for dead with deep stab wounds in his neck and chest. He was terribly traumatised.
I asked again, ‘What was so good about it?’
He thought for a moment longer, then looked up: ‘She gave me a hug.’
And I remembered it. The carer had opened the door, given him a great big hug and said, ‘Come on in.’
I thought this was wonderful. I don’t think anyone had touched him, except to take his fingerprints, since his parents had been murdered. This foster carer, with one simple act, had given the boy the one thing he wanted more than anything else – a simple act of love. The foster carer had shown him he could be loved.
If humanity is missing you’re up against it; it’s a massive thing to have missing from your life. That’s often at the root of what we see in kids who’ve been neglected. Why would we want to carry on that neglect in our profession when it should all be about prot
ection and healing? That applies to both children and their parents. I’m a normal human being and I get angry with parents who have neglected their children but, at the same time, I can still provide them with a level of respect, dignity and decency. Too many social workers are forced into box-ticking exercises with the people they’re trying to help – completing forms with fifty questions when time spent on a more human approach would be far more valuable and would probably lead to a smaller chance of mistakes being made.
Science supports the idea that sensory stimulation by mothers (and fathers), i.e. touch, has long-term benefits in terms of its effect on a child’s brain development. Animal experiments have taught us that babies who are never picked up die from stress. Babies who are born prematurely and are placed in incubators will have more rapid brain growth if they are touched for just a few minutes each day. Cuddling, holding and stroking all come naturally to humans. It reduces anxiety by creating more brain receptors for the naturally occurring tranquillising group of chemicals called benzodiazepines. When someone is addicted to tranquillisers, it says something about their childhood.
Children in foster care, most of whom are hoping for adoption, need all the cuddles they can get. Human beings need humanity. This shouldn’t be an issue. It should be part of normality. We need to make a conscious effort to get away from worrying about covering our backs, from safeguarding rules, from the dreaded side hug.
Today, I tell my staff off for giving side hugs. I tell them about the movie Good Will Hunting with Robin Williams playing therapist Dr Sean Maguire and Matt Damon as Will Hunting, the troubled young man trying to re-evaluate his life and stay out of prison. At the end, Dr Maguire keeps saying to Will: ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s not your fault.’
