by Angela Hart
‘My foster carer pushed me against a wall, Angela,’ she said, as she climbed into our car at the retail park where we picked her up. As she spoke Keeley looked at me with her now familiar doe eyes, and she batted her eyelashes in an exaggerated way, making herself look forlorn and vulnerable.
‘She pushed you against a wall?’ I replied, buckling my seatbelt and turning to check she was fastening hers in the back of the car.
When you employ this mirroring technique, repeating back what a child has said, the hope is that they will carry on talking without the risk of being influenced by a leading question. Unfortunately, often the conversation dries up, because without a direct prompt the child doesn’t know what to say next, or simply finds it easier to say nothing. This was not the case at all with Keeley.
‘Yes, she pushed me out the way, and that’s how I got the bruise,’ she said before launching into a breathless account of how her foster carer had told her off for something, and then shoved her into the kitchen wall, apparently while trying to get past her to leave the room.
I was upset to hear this and encouraged Keeley to give me more details, though I also had to explain to her that I would need to pass this information to Social Services.
‘Do you have to tell them everything?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that is the rule. We can’t keep any secrets, and so it’s important you tell me things exactly as they happened.’
Keeley then admitted she had done ‘something’ wrong – though she couldn’t remember what – immediately beforehand. From her explanation it sounded like the foster carer might have inadvertently pushed her into the wall as she tried to get away, maybe to stop the situation escalating. I didn’t imagine for one minute that the foster carer had pushed Keeley deliberately, or intended to hurt her, but of course I wasn’t there and so this was clearly just my opinion.
The view I formed may have been completely inaccurate and when it came to reporting this to Social Services, as I would have to do, in this situation my opinion didn’t count in any case. I would have to pass on Keeley’s verbatim account without adding any of my own views, and then it would be over to the social workers to investigate.
Many years earlier, we’d had an incident in the park involving Jonathan and a teenage boy we had staying with us. They were happily playing with a Frisbee when the boy, who had a very unpredictable temper, suddenly and very deliberately flung the Frisbee directly in Jonathan’s face, knocking his sunglasses off. Jonathan was furious and, in the heat of the moment, he lost his temper and swore at the boy. Jonathan apologised as soon as he’d calmed down, but he had no choice but to phone Social Services and report himself for what he had said and how he reacted. The call was logged and followed up by a social worker, who praised Jonathan for owning up straight away and giving a truthful account of what happened. She also talked to the boy very fairly about what he had done wrong, and no further action had been taken.
We felt the social worker handled the situation really well. Jonathan had never been involved in anything like that before, and nothing of that nature has ever occurred since. We discussed how you need to be extremely patient to be a foster carer, and the social worker acknowledged that of course it’s impossible to never be impatient, or to never lose your temper.
‘I couldn’t do your job,’ she said, which is something many social workers have said to us over the years.
I was reminded of this conversation when I came across a ‘thought of the day’ recently, on the website of The Post Institute, which is an American organisation offering advice and support for carers of children with challenging behaviour. The thought of the day pointed out that we cannot be patient all of the time, commenting wryly that it would help if you lived in a monastery and ‘didn’t have a child demanding of you each moment, as you also have the demands of life pulling at you’. The article went on to say that you should of course apologise to the child when you lose patience, but added that you should also apologise to yourself, because you have upset and offended yourself. This was certainly true in Jonathan’s case. He felt terrible for what he had done, and he regretted the incident personally, as well as on behalf of the teenager.
Ultimately, that experience has always stayed with us, reminding us how life can very easily turn on a sixpence, and how very careful and professional we need to be in our daily lives. Everybody does lose his or her patience. When you are a foster carer you are often pushed to the limits and you have to work very hard to keep yourself in check, because there is a tremendous amount at stake.
This is just one of the many disciplines we have learned over the years. We have also been trained never to pass judgement on another carer, or any child’s parent or relative, whatever the story we may have heard, or whatever unsavoury facts we are party to. An extreme example of this is when we once had a child staying with us who had been sexually abused by her father. She still adored her dad despite what he had done to her, and we had to take her to supervised contact sessions with him and sit quietly outside, keeping our feelings about this man completely to ourselves while he played happily with his daughter.
Similarly, we are also trained never to judge or question a child when they make a disclosure. I’m sure some people might have questioned whether Keeley had exaggerated or even made up the story about how she got the bruise. After all, we’d had the suspicious injury to Ben’s arm, her own arm and the apparent accident with her skipping rope, but my instinct was not to openly doubt Keeley in any way, as that would also go against everything I’ve been taught over the years.
Asking a child ‘are you sure this really happened?’ or ‘are you sure it happened that way?’ are phrases that should not be in the vocabulary of any foster carer. You never know when a child might be on the brink of telling you something very important, and so you must always be ready and willing to listen, and to make the child feel they are being heard and believed in every scenario you come across. Some youngsters take years and years to find the courage to talk about what has taken place in their life, and being doubted by a carer after they have made a disclosure of any sort can be very damaging indeed. In the worst-case scenario it can make the child clam up completely, with devastating effects on their long-term recovery.
I knew that when we got home and I put the call in to Social Services, giving them Keeley’s account of how she got the bruise, it would mean that her former foster carer could be suspended from looking after any kids until the case had been fully investigated. Keeley was her only foster child at the time, but even so this would inevitably cause a great deal of distress and disruption to the carer’s life. I was worried about this, but once again it was not something I had any choice or control over.
I’ve learned that to succeed in fostering you also need to be very pragmatic and actually quite tough – the sort of person who can diligently follow rules and guidelines, but also has the guts to challenge the authorities when they feel a child isn’t getting what they need.
As new foster carers, Jonathan and I were concerned that if we spoke out Social Services may disagree with our views, and we were worried about being dropped as carers if we stuck our heads above the parapet. Nowadays it’s very different, and this is down to the excellent training we’ve received ever since becoming specialist carers. From that point on, in the nineties, it was made clear to us that it was our duty to be there for the child and to fight for their rights if need be. Our support social worker would be there to back us up, and if they didn’t agree with our views we could discuss the situation together and work out a plan going forward.
Since then Jonathan and I have had the confidence to always speak our mind to social workers and their managers, because our main concern is the child, and we will always fight their corner, even if it doesn’t make us popular. I’m not worried anymore, because I’ve learned that if you follow Social Services protocol, make the necessary reports in the correct mann
er and behave with integrity, with the child’s interests at heart, you cannot be unfairly judged or penalised. Sometimes this means stepping outside of Social Services to fight for a child’s rights, and I have done this many times after first discussing it with our support social worker and gaining their approval.
An example of this is when Jonathan and I had a very frustrating problem getting a child in our care into school locally. She had special needs and came to us from a different county, many miles away, and both her social worker and ours had pulled out all the stops to try to make her transfer swift and smooth. The girl was in her GCSE year and so it was important she didn’t miss any lessons. A school place was available on our doorstep but at the eleventh hour red tape held everything up. The problem was that the girl had ADHD and needed extra support. She had been statemented to this effect while still living at her former address, but the extra funding required to educate her had been allocated to her home county, as that was the way the system worked. Her allocated funding had to be passed on to our county so she could take up her school place, but for some unknown reason this didn’t happen when it should have done.
The girl ended up sitting at home or coming into the shop with me when she should have been in the classroom, which was an outrageous situation. After exhausting all the regular channels of communication with Social Services I told my social worker I was going to contact our local education authority directly, to discuss the situation and potentially take up the case with the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, which I had researched. The social worker supported me, and fortunately the situation was resolved very soon after I wrote a strong letter to the LEA. The child finally went to school, having missed a month of lessons completely unnecessarily.
Soon after we arrived home from the retail park, I did what was needed and put the call in to Social Services about Keeley’s bruise, passing on everything Keeley had told me, word for word, to a duty social worker. I also wrote notes in my daily diary about the state of Keeley’s hair with all the lice, for the social worker to read at her next visit. However badly this reflected on her previous foster carer, it wasn’t right that Keeley had such a bad case of head lice, and I had a duty to flag it up.
‘Can I play out?’ Keeley had asked as we pulled up at our house.
‘You can later,’ I said. ‘But I’ve noticed your hair needs a good wash first. Will you let me do it for you?’
‘Why? I normally wash it in the shower by myself.’
‘I think you may have head lice, Keeley. Has your head been itching?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. I think we’ll wash your hair over the bath and I can comb it through with conditioner to get the lice out. Then I’ll put some special lotion on that should clear the problem up. I’ve got some in the cupboard.’
‘Have you got nits?’
‘No, but lots of children get them and so it’s something I keep in the house. It’s very common, Keeley. Don’t worry about it, we’ll soon have you sorted out.’
She didn’t argue, and for the next hour or so I painstakingly combed through her long, thick curls with a fine metal nit comb, watching scores of live lice of different sizes fall from her hair as she held her head over the bath. Afterwards I dried and plaited her hair, which really suited her, and she finally went out to play, taking her ragdoll, Jinty, with her once more. I reminded her to play nicely with the other children and told her that this time I would be watching from the house. She assured me very sweetly that she would, and I felt a surge of love for her. It must have been awful having all those lice in her hair, and having to sit there for so long while I tried to tease them out. Keeley didn’t complain though. I admired her for that, and it made me want to care for her and protect her even more. She deserved to be loved and cherished, and I wanted to make her life as happy and comfortable as I possibly could.
‘How’s she doing?’ Jonathan asked, coming to stand next to me at the window.
‘She seems very chirpy,’ I replied. ‘She’s a lovely little thing, really. Mind you, I’ve noticed she’s usually good when she’s getting one-to-one attention from me. I suppose that figures, given her mother’s issues.’
I’d gleaned a little bit more information about Keeley’s mother in my last telephone conversation with our support social worker.
‘Can you tell me anything more about the emotional abuse Keeley suffered?’ I asked Sandy. ‘Only I’ve been thinking about how her mother failed to bond properly with her.’
Sandy explained that Keeley had a therapy session once a month, principally to help her deal with the emotional neglect she had suffered from birth.
‘I can’t disclose the details of the therapy because of patient confidentiality, of course, but what I can tell you, Angela, is that Keeley’s mother has the mental age of a young adolescent. She wasn’t equipped to care for her daughter properly. A note in the file says: “Tina is not a loving and consistent mother figure to Keeley. She is emotionally absent, neglectful, unpredictable and occasionally violent.” That is why Keeley was eventually placed on the Child Protection Register.’
‘I see,’ I replied thoughtfully.
‘Unfortunately,’ Sandy went on, ‘by that point Keeley was six years old and damage had already been done, not least because it appears the only regular help Tina received was from Keeley’s grandfather, Eric, whose character was, and still is, in question.’
After I’d plaited Keeley’s hair and she’d gone out to play I stood by the back gate, watching her approach a large group of children gathered in the small play area in the far corner of the rec. Keeley went straight up to a girl on the swings, and almost immediately began hitting her on the legs with Jinty, the ragdoll.
I ran across the field calling Keeley’s name, but by the time I arrived at the swings she was out of control, shouting and swearing and lashing out at several children.
‘She’s just tried to kick me between the legs!’ one young boy blurted out.
‘She’s crazy,’ the girl on the swing shouted.
‘I’m sorry about all this,’ I said, taking hold of Keeley’s arm. ‘What do you have to say, Keeley? I think you have some apologising to do.’
‘What for?’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes and cuddling Jinty, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. ‘They started it! She wouldn’t let me go on the swing!’
‘Did you ask nicely for a turn?’
‘Yes!’ Keeley said indignantly.
‘No she didn’t!’ several of the kids testified.
‘Come on, Keeley, I’m taking you in. I’m sorry, kids. I’ll sort this out at home.’
The words hung in the air. How was I going to sort this out? I wasn’t sure yet, but I vowed to myself that I was going to, somehow. It wasn’t Keeley’s fault that she was like this. She had been dealt a very difficult hand in her early life, and I was going to give her all the help and support I possibly could to help her grow into a happy, decent and kind young person.
5
‘You’re a total bastard!’
Keeley finally moved in with us full time in the spring, about five weeks after we’d first met her. Shortly after her last weekend visit, we’d had what is known as a ‘core meeting’ to discuss the arrangements, which was held at an old and rather run down Social Services building close to Keeley’s two previous foster homes and her mother’s flat, some thirty miles away from where we lived. Jonathan and I were technically ‘out of area’ for Keeley, but this was not a problem. We often took in children from even further afield, either because of child protection issues which meant it was safer for a child to live away from their old neighbourhood, or more typically because there were no other specialist carers available closer to home. This was the case with Keeley.
She had been in respite care since her weekend stay with us, as the allegations she made about her foster carer giving her the bruise on her cheek meant she could no longer stay in that placement. The carer was under inve
stigation for the time being, so it was not feasible for Keeley to stay and emergency cover was hastily found. Unfortunately, Keeley couldn’t move in with us until her transfer to our local primary school and other practicalities were dealt with, and the core meeting had been held to agree all of these arrangements. This was attended by our social worker, Sandy, plus Sandy’s manager, Sheila Briggs, and Keeley’s social worker, Joan.
The first thing we learned after Jonathan and I took a seat around the large wooden table in the Social Services office was that Keeley wasn’t happy in respite care and couldn’t wait to move in with us. Joan had found this out after speaking to Keeley in advance of the meeting, which of course we were pleased to hear.
‘I asked Keeley if she minded moving to a new area and a new school when she moved in with Mr and Mrs Hart,’ Joan reported. ‘Keeley said that no, she didn’t mind at all and in fact she couldn’t wait. She doesn’t like her respite carer and wants to move as quickly as possible. She said she would miss her friends when she moved out of the area, but she wasn’t worried about this and knew she would make new friends, and might still be able to see her old ones if she went to her old neighbourhood to visit her mother in the future.’
It can take up to twenty-eight days for a child to transfer between carers, as this is the notice period a carer must give if they want a child removed. Keeley’s previous full-time carer had already given her notice, but of course with the investigation now taking place this was irrelevant in any case. We were ready to take Keeley in as soon as she was able to come, and it was agreed at the meeting that her transfer to us would be prioritised and put in place as quickly as possible.
As well as setting up a new school place, the child needs to be registered with our local doctor, dentist and optician, and we need to organise contact visits with the parent or parents, where appropriate. In Keeley’s case it was decided that her mother would be allowed weekly, supervised contact in a small Social Services office near her home. Jonathan and I agreed we would take Keeley there on a Friday for 4.30 p.m. My mum would come over to our house to be in for Carl and Phillip coming in from school and our assistant would close up the shop for us. If ever we couldn’t manage the round trip to the contact session, which could take up to an hour and three-quarters, we were told we could make arrangements in advance fora social worker to take Keeley there and back.
