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Recent Posts
- Homeschooling Regulation, Institutional Power, and the Erasure of School-Based Abuse
- Systemic Foster Care Omissions and the Lifelong Barriers They Create
- When Gifted Children Became Subjects
- How Race Shapes Systemic Responses to Abuse in Foster Care:
- Gifted Cognition in Adverse Environments: Systems Thinking, Trauma, and Misrecognition in Foster Care
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Author Archives: societyshiddensecret
Homeschooling Regulation, Institutional Power, and the Erasure of School-Based Abuse
A survivor-led analysis of safeguarding policy and institutional accountability This article examines recent proposals to expand state oversight of home education in England, questioning the assumptions that underpin them. Written from lived experience alongside engagement with safeguarding policy and research, … Continue reading
Systemic Foster Care Omissions and the Lifelong Barriers They Create
An Analysis Informed by Lived Experience Introduction The purpose of this work is to document, analyse, and contextualise experiences within the UK care system from the perspective of someone directly affected by it. By combining personal testimony with existing research … Continue reading
When Gifted Children Became Subjects
Non-Verbal Testing, Hypnosis, and the Experience of Being Studied Institutional Context: Bristol in the 1980s During the 1970s and 1980s, research into children’s cognition expanded significantly across the United Kingdom. Educational psychologists, universities, and schools increasingly explored non-verbal intelligence, spatial … Continue reading
How Race Shapes Systemic Responses to Abuse in Foster Care:
An Analysis Informed by Lived Experience in the 1980s and 1990s Introduction Entering foster care as a mixed race child meant entering a system already structured by racialised assumptions about vulnerability, behaviour, and credibility. From the outset, I was placed … Continue reading
Gifted Cognition in Adverse Environments: Systems Thinking, Trauma, and Misrecognition in Foster Care
Recognising Diverse Forms of Giftedness The following section explains how my cognitive style developed within the context of foster care and trauma, and why forms of giftedness that do not follow traditional educational pathways are often overlooked among children in … Continue reading
Institutional Accountability and Legal Responsibility
Institutional Accountability, Embodied Trauma, and Pathways to Justice This article discusses the longer-term impacts of institutional betrayal, substantiated abuse, its physiological consequences, and the pathways to justice from a lived perspective – referencing my own ethnographic experience, and substantiated statutory … Continue reading
Ethnographic Case Narrative: Early Menopause, Chronic Trauma, and Institutional Accountability
This narrative is written not as an outsider analysing policy, but as someone who lived inside the contradictions, denials, and harms of state care. What follows is both lived experience and embodied data: an ethnography in which my body is … Continue reading
Posted in societyshiddensecrets
Tagged child abuse, ethnographic study trauma, foster care, healing, health, historic abuse, mental-health, ptsd, social services, Trauma
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The Mental Toll of Childhood Trauma Across Life Stages
Understanding the psychological impact of trauma requires both evidence and lived truth. This piece blends academic research with my personal journey through childhood trauma, showing how early experiences shape the body, mind, and identity over time. By placing theory alongside … Continue reading
When Records Rewrite Reality: How False Narratives in Social Care Shape a Survivor’s Life
Decades after leaving foster care, I discovered that my social care files contained false and damaging narratives — ones that followed me into adulthood, shaped how professionals treated me, and nearly silenced my truth. This is how official records can … Continue reading
Posted in societyshiddensecrets
Tagged abuse, child abuse, False narratives in social care, family, healing, historic abuse, mental-health, ptsd, social services, Trauma
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Foster Care Displacement: Criminalization, Credibility, and hidden agenda.
When I was 10 years old, I spoke up about sexual abuse for the first time.I believed that telling the truth would make the adults around me protect me.Instead, the foster care system was used to displace, criminalize and disorientate … Continue reading
Yes we do! Sorry for your experience, hopefully by talking about how these experiences impact us, we can create change,…