Trigger Warning: Mentions of state care, child abuse, and surveillance of care-experienced parents.
Written from lived experience.

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A Child of the Court

I became a ward of court at eight years old. From that moment, the state claimed legal guardianship over me. It decided where I lived, who cared for me, and how my future would unfold.
For ten years, every decision about my life was made on paper by strangers, signing their names beneath the word care.

By sixteen, I had survived more than most adults could imagine. I was still learning what love, safety, and trust were supposed to feel like when I became a mother myself. My son was born while I was still under the court’s guardianship. I was a child raising a child, still technically in the custody of the very system that had already failed to protect me.

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When Guardians Become Watchers

After my son was born, the professionals around me told me they were there to “support” me. They helped me move into a small flat and said they would check in, make sure we were okay.
I believed them.

What they never told me was that they had opened a file on my parenting. Without my knowledge or consent, they were assessing me as a risk. I wasn’t told I was being monitored, or that my child now had his own record within the same system that had documented my childhood. I was still a ward of court — a legal child — but somehow also a subject of investigation. No one explained when I stopped being their responsibility and became their potential suspect. Which further damaged trust in institutions, their practice and moral standards.

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The Manipulation of Information

In care, information is power. From childhood, social workers learn to draw it out gently, conversationally, then record it as evidence. A casual chat about feelings can appear later in a report as proof of instability. When that same method is applied to young parents in care, it becomes a subtle form of coercion: observation disguised as support. It is emotionally manipulative by nature. It teaches the child that words are manipulated, and experiences exploited and misconstrued.

My records said I was a good mother. But those same files also existed as surveillance — a quiet insurance policy for the system that raised me. I had no say in what was written, no knowledge of what was discussed behind closed doors. My privacy was not mine to own.

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Cruelty by Paperwork

This is how cruelty hides in plain sight. No threats, no shouting — just files, assessments, and signatures. When authority is exercised through paperwork, responsibility disappears into procedure. Everyone follows “protocol,” and no one is accountable.

If something went wrong, the record could be rewritten. If something went right, it could be minimised.
Each note, each omission, each polite distortion keeps the institution protected. The child’s truth — and later, the young parent’s truth — becomes whatever the paperwork says it is.

That is the genius and the horror of bureaucratic control: it creates harm that looks like help.

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The Cycle of Coercion

The system’s power doesn’t end when a child leaves care. It seeps quietly into adulthood, shaping how others see you and how you see yourself. A note written when you were fourteen can reappear when you’re twenty-five. A misunderstood behaviour can become “evidence of risk.” A single paragraph in an old report can justify lifelong suspicion. Regardless if it was caused by harm within the care system, as those parts are often intentionally omitted.

This is how the care system reproduces itself. Through files. Through labels. Through the quiet assumption that those raised in state care are destined to fail their own children.
It’s not protection, it’s generational profiling.

For care-experienced parents, that knowledge changes everything. You learn that the system watching you is the same one that once claimed to protect you. The trust is gone, replaced by vigilance. You parent while being observed, always aware that a file may outlive your own voice. While your own voice and experiences remain silenced, by bureaucracy and bad practices.

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The Psychological Toll

This constant observation has an invisible cost.
It teaches young parents to self-monitor, to question every emotion, every decision. It erodes the natural bond between vulnerability and asking for help, because help has already been weaponized once before. It creates distrust of the very system that should be available to help parents, because it represents coercion, emotional abuse and manipulation.

For those with complex trauma or CPTSD, this surveillance reinforces the old message: that safety is conditional, that care is performance, that people meant to help, have hidden agendas. It creates a community within which there is no professional support, because the trust was broken long before it ever had a chance to be beneficial. It becomes a trigger, and a source of re-traumatization.

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The Right to Privacy, Dignity, and Truth

Every person who grows up in care has the right to rebuild their life without being trapped by the state’s version of their story. Support should never come with hidden assessments. Guardianship should not evolve into surveillance. Foster children have a higher chance at having their children taken and adopted, without proper legal rights. Based on inaccurate files, and often institutional failures and lies.

A state that claims to raise children must also learn to let them live freely, without carrying the stigma of its own failures.

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Breaking the Inherited Cycle

To speak about this openly is to reclaim ownership of your own story. Every survivor who requests their files, who reads between the lines, who challenges the falsehoods. That act alone breaks the silence the system depends on.

For decades, care has been measured in paperwork, and inaccurate record keeping.

But care was never meant to be written, it was meant to be felt.

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Author’s Note
Written by a care-experienced survivor and former ward of court. This piece explores how systemic control extends beyond childhood, shaping how care leavers are seen, treated, and recorded by the very institutions that raised them.