By a survivor of the Bristol City Council care system (1980s–1990s)

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A Silent Injustice Hidden in Plain Sight

The character assassination of foster children is one of society’s most uncomfortable secrets. It rarely enters public debate because it forces us to confront an unsettling truth. That within a system built to protect, there exists a culture of malice, denial, and erasure.

When I first read my own social care records, I noticed a disturbing pattern. The language used to describe me, from the age of just three years old, shifted from dismissive to damning as I grew older. What began as notes labelling me “a handful” soon evolved into written character attacks that obscured the reality of abuse.

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How Normal Childhood Behaviour Becomes Weaponised

Descriptions in my early records portrayed normal play — running around, laughing, being boisterous — as signs of dysfunction. Foster parents who were paid large sums of money to care for children often exaggerated behaviour to appear burdened or victimised.

The state funded these placements, sometimes enough for families to renovate homes, yet failed to see the harm of pathologising ordinary childhood energy. Every “wild” moment became another justification to control, label, or silence a child in care.

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When Trauma Responses Are Mislabelled as Personality Flaws

As I grew older, my behaviour changed, not because I was “difficult”, but because I was traumatised. Yet the system translated trauma into pathology. My distress became “manipulative”. My silence was “defiance”. My fear of men was “irrational”.

The same records that branded me in this way barely mentioned my direct disclosures of sexual abuse. Foster parents, social workers, and even managers dismissed them as lies, some going so far as to write those lies into permanent files.

Instead of detailed investigations, there were just biased adult opinions, missing documents, and policy breaches that stripped me of my basic rights as a looked-after child.

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The Adults Who Knew — and Did Nothing

Between the ages of eight and thirteen, I was sexually abused in foster care under the supervision of Bristol City Council (formerly Avon County Council). I disclosed my abuse to multiple adults — at least two social workers, one foster parent, two older foster children, and one stranger.

Later, while reading my files as an adult, I discovered over ten professionals had either suspected or known about my abuse. None of them acted. None of them even spoke to me about it.

In 2019, more than 25 years after I aged out of care, the same manager who had overseen my case sat on the complaint panel for my abuse investigation. This is the same person responsible for the years of systemic neglect and inaction that allowed the abuse to continue.

How can a manager who failed to protect a child sit in judgment of that same survivor decades later?

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The Machinery of Denial and Damage Control

In my experience, social services are structured to mitigate liability, not protect children.
When children disclose abuse, the instinct isn’t to investigate — it’s to manage. Files are sanitised. Notes are vague. Records omit crucial details that could later serve as evidence in criminal or civil cases.

This lack of documentation isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. Police and family courts rely on social care records to assess credibility. When those records lack detail or contain bias, survivors are discredited before they even begin to speak.

As the 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found, “institutional responses often prioritised reputation over the welfare of children.”¹

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The Corporate Parent’s Conflict of Interest

Local authorities act as both corporate parent and legal shield. Their first obligation should be to the child, but in practice it is to their own protection.

When a local authority knows that multiple professionals failed to report or act on disclosures, that authority becomes legally vulnerable. So instead of admitting fault, they manipulate records, obscure timelines, and sometimes even keep the same staff in place for decades.

In 2020, I discovered written evidence of multiple staff knowing about my abuse — and none taking action. Those same individuals, and their managers, remain in positions of power today.

This is not child protection. This is institutional betrayal.

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A System That Rewards Silence

The absence of accountability means the people who failed children still make decisions about new generations of vulnerable young people. They continue to be paid, promoted, and protected.

How does a system built to protect children justify placing multiple children with a known or suspected abuser — and then label those same children “liars”? How does it justify decades of cover-ups, while survivors are left to rebuild their lives alone?

The answer lies in one uncomfortable truth: the UK child protection system protects itself before it protects children.

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Towards Transparency and Justice

If foster children are ever to be treated as equal citizens, their records must be re-examined, their voices centred, and the adults who failed them held to account.

No survivor should have to uncover decades of deceit to prove they were harmed in a system that claimed to care.

Until then, the character assassination of foster children will remain one of Britain’s darkest open secrets — a state-sponsored silencing of those it was meant to protect.

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References

¹ Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), The Final Report, October 2022.
² Department for Education, Children Act 1989: Guidance and Regulations – Volume 2: Care Planning, Placement and Case Review, 2021 Update.