Systemic Obstruction: How UK Social Services Undermine Statutory Rights and Accountability

Posted on October 24, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

Introduction

The United Kingdom’s social care system operates under a framework designed to protect children and ensure transparency. Yet for many care-experienced people like me, the reality is one of systematic obstruction and institutional self-protection.

Statutory mechanisms such as the Children Act 1989, the Data Protection Act 2018, and the Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure (England) Regulations 2006 establish clear duties:

  • Local authorities must accurately record disclosures.
  • Care leavers must have full access to their personal files.
  • Complaints must be received, investigated, and independently reviewed.

However, a growing body of evidence; including statutory reviews, care leaver testimonies, and data access disputes, shows that many authorities fail to comply with these legal obligations.
What emerges is not mere administrative oversight, but a pattern of structural avoidance, where procedure becomes a shield against scrutiny.

1. Knowledge as Control

Statutory guidance requires that children in care and care leavers are informed of their rights to access information, seek redress, and lodge complaints. Yet numerous cases reveal that local authorities routinely fail to provide this information, or release it only after repeated requests and legal escalation.

This omission denies individuals their statutory rights by exploiting a knowledge imbalance.
Those raised in the care system — often without parental advocacy or legal literacy — depend entirely on the authority’s duty to inform. When that duty is neglected, ignorance becomes institutionalised as a form of control.

Internal correspondence from several councils shows vague refusals to disclose information, citing “data protection concerns” or “third-party confidentiality.” In many instances, these justifications are legally unfounded but operationally effective in delaying access.

2. The Architecture of Partial Access

When access is eventually granted, it is often partial or manipulated. Care-experienced adults describe receiving hundreds of pages of administrative paperwork — only to find critical sections, including abuse disclosures or internal discussions, redacted or missing.

Authorities commonly invoke “internal correspondence” exemptions or “data minimisation” principles. But these practices amount to institutional narrative control: by choosing what to disclose, local authorities effectively rewrite history to protect themselves.

Such selective redaction undermines the Data Protection Act’s transparency principle and the safeguarding duties set out in Working Together to Safeguard Children (2018).

3. Blocking the Statutory Complaints Route

The Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure Regulations mandate a three-stage complaints process, including independent review at Stage 3.
Yet councils often obstruct this route through technical gatekeeping and procedural diversion.

Common methods include:

  • Reframing complaints as “service requests” or “historic matters” to avoid statutory timescales.
  • Requiring complainants to provide specific details that are inaccessible without full file disclosure.
  • Declaring cases ineligible due to the passage of time, despite no statutory limitation for complaints about childhood events.

In effect, the same authorities accused of wrongdoing control the process meant to investigate them — turning the complaints system into a closed circuit of self-protection.

4. Language as Legal Defence

Local authority communications often employ carefully neutral phrasing — “information not available,” “appropriate action was taken,” “lessons have been learned.”

This language conveys procedural compliance without transparency. It closes conversation while implying accountability.
Where errors are acknowledged, they are described as “isolated oversights” rather than evidence of systemic failure.

The effect is linguistic containment — the bureaucratic equivalent of gas-lighting — where victims’ experiences are sanitised through administrative tone.

5. The Psychological and Social Impact

For survivors of abuse within state care, these bureaucratic barriers are not simply administrative failures, they are a continuation of harm.

Discovering that childhood disclosures were ignored, erased, or rewritten can retraumatise survivors, echoing the original silencing.
This form of bureaucratic trauma reflects how administrative systems can replicate the power dynamics of abuse: disbelief, control, and erasure.

When the state dictates the “official” version of one’s own childhood, justice is not merely delayed — it is systemically denied.

6. The Structural Incentive to Obstruct

Why do these failures persist despite clear statutory duties?
Because the system is designed to protect institutions before people.

Local authorities face reputational, legal, and financial risks if they admit fault. Acknowledging errors invites liability, compensation claims, and potential inquiry.
Thus, internal cultures of risk management and defensive governance often outweigh the statutory duty to truth.

This creates a moral paradox: agencies tasked with child protection have the strongest institutional motive to obscure their own failures.

7. Towards Independent Oversight

Existing oversight mechanisms — including the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) — lack both independence and enforcement power.

Meaningful reform must include:

  • A national independent authority for care-record access and complaints.
  • Statutory guarantees of full, unredacted access to personal files.
  • Legal penalties for data manipulation or obstruction.
  • A duty of candour in children’s services, analogous to healthcare.

Such measures would shift the balance of power from institutional discretion to individual rights, aligning practice with Article 8 (right to private and family life) and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Conclusion

The UK’s statutory framework for social care is robust on paper. The failure lies in its enforcement and culture.

When local authorities deny access to records, reframe complaints, or obscure information, they breach not only procedural guidance but the foundational principles of justice and transparency.

Until records access, complaints, and redress mechanisms are independently overseen, the truth about abuse and neglect in state care will remain filtered through the lens of institutional self-preservation.

In such a system, procedural order conceals moral collapse — and accountability remains a privilege, not a right.

References

  • Children Act 1989
  • Data Protection Act 2018
  • The Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure (England) Regulations 2006
  • Working Together to Safeguard Children (HM Government, 2018)
  • Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman Guidance
  • European Convention on Human Rights, Articles 8 and 13
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Professional detachment: When Disclosures Are Managed And Silenced.

Posted on October 23, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

(Trigger Warning: Mentions of child abuse, institutional neglect, and systemic failure.)

Introduction

The United Kingdom presents itself as a civilized nation — reasonable, fair, and humane.
But anyone who has lived within its care systems knows that the image doesn’t match the reality.

Beneath the polite tone of official correspondence and the structured order of public services lies something quietly barbaric: a culture that hides cruelty behind procedure, and indifference behind professionalism.

This is not chaos — it’s designed order:
a system so polished in appearance that the harm it inflicts becomes invisible, even to those operating it.

Professional Detachment: When Care Becomes Performance

Children in care quickly learn what “professional detachment” really means.
It’s the rule that social workers must not get too attached, must not feel too deeply. They must not cross invisible lines of emotional connection, and must maintain “boundaries” with foster children’s suffering.

On paper, it’s about protecting boundaries. In practice, it’s about protecting adults.
It keeps workers safe from the emotional weight of what they witness. Yet for children, this distance is devastating. It tells them they are unworthy of love, comfort, or acknowledgment.

This detachment becomes a kind of shield — one that keeps empathy out. The result is a system where compassion feels dangerous, and where the more emotionally distant a worker is, the more “professional” they appear.
Over time, this culture numbs everyone involved. Children become data points; pain becomes statistics.

When I Spoke

When I was around ten years old, I told my social worker that I was being sexually abused.
She believed me. She did everything a child protection worker is meant to do — she listened, she cared, and she reported it to her manager.

Then she was told something that still echoes in my life decades later:

“We’re not going to do anything about it.”

It wasn’t logged. It wasn’t documented. It was erased.
And so was the reality I lived — at least on paper.

The Cost of Telling the Truth

At the time, no one knew that I had also told others the same thing.
I had confided in a temporary foster carer that a man was coming into my room at night.
Instead of protecting me, she later told my long-term foster mother that I was lying.

A year later, my long-term foster mother relayed that information back to social workers and team managers.
Again — nothing happened. They all colluded that I was lying.

No one came to speak to me directly. No one checked if I was safe.
Instead, a note was added to my file: that I had “told lies about a man” and “struggled to relate normally to men.”

That became the official version of events — the “truth” in my records.
A truth written without my voice.

Over twenty years later, I learned that I was not the first child who complained.
I was the third.

A statutory-led report confirmed that all three children were recorded as “liars” or as “not telling the truth.”

When Records Replace Reality

There was no investigation, no interview, and no protection.
Instead, a false narrative was entered into the system and left to live there — shaping how every future professional would see me.

My social worker, the one who had tried to advocate for me, was told to emotionally disengage and carry on as if nothing had happened.
She couldn’t. She had a mental health breakdown, was put on medication to cope, left her job, and eventually left the UK altogether.

Even the people who cared were punished for caring.
The system breaks the child — and then it breaks the adults who dare to believe them.

The Lasting Damage

For me, the consequence wasn’t just the abuse itself.
It was the gas-lighting that followed — the experience of being rewritten by adults who were supposed to protect me.
When the official records say you lied, your truth becomes invisible, even to yourself.

It took me years to unpick that — to realise that I had spoken, and that they had chosen not to listen.
They were the ones who lied and wrote lies.
That silence became part of my trauma, another wound that didn’t heal because it wasn’t even recognised.

Silencing by Design

Social work in the UK often talks about “professional detachment,” as though caring too much is a flaw.
But detachment becomes a tool for cruelty when it allows people to ignore suffering and still sleep at night.

In care, everyone knows that emotional connection is discouraged — that workers aren’t allowed to attach to the children.
That’s how the harm keeps repeating: when compassion is treated as unprofessional, abuse becomes easy to overlook.

What happened to me wasn’t a mistake. It was the system functioning exactly as designed.

A Record Without a Voice

Somewhere, buried in archives and databases, there are notes that say I lied about abuse.
That other children lied about abuse within the same placement.

That’s the version professionals can access — not the truth I told, not the truth my social worker tried to act on, not the truth the other children tried to tell before me.
Only the detached version that was recorded to protect the institution.

Cruelty by Paperwork

In Britain’s foster care system, cruelty rarely looks like an aggressive act.

It looks like:

  • Missing records in a report that would expose knowledge about abuse.
  • Redacted paragraphs in Subject Access Requests.
  • Unrecorded or omitted disclosures of abuse.
  • A social worker “rewording” a statement for clarity — conveniently removing the part that exposes institutional failure.

Each act seems small, even defensible.
But collectively, they form a machinery of harm so vast that no one can be blamed. Responsibility dissolves into process.

It is cruelty diffused through paperwork — the kind that leaves no fingerprints.

When things go wrong, investigations talk about “oversight,” “miscommunication,” or “lessons to be learned.”
Rarely do they say: someone knew, and chose not to act.

That diffusion of responsibility is deliberate. It protects the system — not the children.

The Illusion of Order

Everything looks orderly from the outside.
Meetings happen on schedule. Reports are filed. Decisions are made.

There is no visible chaos, yet the outcomes are catastrophic.
Children disappear. Files vanish. Disclosures are minimised or omitted.
Policy guidelines are ignored.
Trauma is reframed as “attachment issues” or “behavioural problems.”

And the system, calm and self-congratulatory, praises itself again for its professionalism.

Living within that contradiction — of suffering in a system that calls itself care — is its own kind of madness.
It’s psychological gas-lighting on a national scale.

The Moral Cost

“Professional detachment” isn’t just emotional restraint; it’s moral avoidance.
It lets professionals say they care while staying numb to what’s happening.
It allows entire agencies to present harm as procedure and silence as neutrality.

The cost is huge.
It shapes how children in care grow into adults who distrust authority, who flinch at the language of help, and who expect betrayal.
It teaches them that love is unsafe, and care is conditional.

Systemic Accountability and the Burden on Survivors

The greatest cruelty is that the failure becomes the survivor’s burden.
Children grow up carrying the weight of systemic betrayal, and are then expected to navigate adult life within the same institutions that failed them.

This creates a moral inversion: those who were harmed must prove their credibility, while those who caused the harm remain protected by bureaucracy.

Even as adults, survivors encounter disbelief, missing files, and the same polite indifference that silenced them in childhood.

That awareness changes everything.
Survivors learn to see what others can’t; the coded language of reports, the evasions, the patterns of denial.

The tragedy is that this awareness isolates victims.
They know too much about how systems really work, and they know that accountability in the UK foster system is more performance than principle.

Until that changes, survivors remain the ones carrying both the truth and the cost.

Real accountability would mean more than inquiries and reforms.
It would mean admitting that cruelty, abuse, and neglect can wear a suit and carry a clipboard.
That silence can be a policy.
And that children were hurt — not by chaos, but by design

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The Hidden Cost of Survival: How Trauma Becomes a Financial Burden for Care Survivors

Posted on October 22, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

Trigger Warning: Mentions of trauma, abuse, and systemic neglect.
Written from lived experience.

The Price of Healing

For children who grow up in state care, the trauma doesn’t end when the placement ends. The system’s failures echo through adulthood — in the body, in the nervous system, and in the mind. Yet what’s rarely acknowledged is that healing from those injuries carries a cost — one that survivors themselves are forced to pay.

While the state funds the institutions that failed to protect children, it rarely funds the repair of the harm caused. The financial weight of trauma is invisible but immense; therapy sessions, medication, lost work opportunities, exhaustion, disability, and the simple cost of surviving day to day with a body and mind still responding to past abuse.

Trauma Has a Price Tag

Trauma doesn’t end when you leave care, it changes how you live.
For many, PTSD or complex PTSD (CPTSD) becomes a lifelong condition. Flashbacks, insomnia, anxiety, dissociation, chronic fatigue — these are not fleeting experiences. They affect your ability to work consistently, to sustain income, to manage relationships, to cope with everyday tasks.

That means increased costs in daily living:

  • Higher energy and food bills when you can’t cook or leave home easily.
  • Transportation costs for therapy and medical appointments.
  • Paid childcare when you can’t rely on family support.
  • Lost wages from needing more recovery time or flexible hours.
  • The ongoing expense of private therapy, when NHS waiting lists stretch into years.

Healing, for those who can afford it, becomes a full-time job. For those who can’t, survival itself becomes the therapy.

For example: In my own personal experience, to date I have paid over 5k in therapy costs, and around 14k in legal fees.

Therapy: A Right, Not a Luxury

The NHS offers trauma therapy, but only in theory. In practice, most survivors face:

  • Waiting lists that stretch for 12–24 months.
  • Short-term interventions like CBT, often capped at 6–8 sessions despite the complexity of trauma.
  • Limited specialisation, as many public services aren’t equipped to treat complex childhood abuse or CPTSD effectively.

For someone reliving trauma daily, a year-long wait can mean a year of unmanaged symptoms, isolation, or crisis. Private therapy is often the only realistic option, yet it can cost £50–£179 per session. That’s hundreds or even thousands of pounds a year. For survivors who grew up in care or poverty, that is a luxury they should never have to fund alone.

When harm happened under state guardianship, the cost of recovery should never fall on the child who survived it.

The System That Withholds Support

Social care doesn’t just fail to help, it often blocks the routes that can help.
When survivors try to seek compensation or redress, they are met with resistance, denial, and bureaucratic obstruction.
Local authorities and their legal departments routinely:

  • Dispute or deny historical abuse claims, even when internal evidence exists.
  • Delay investigations until survivors give up from emotional exhaustion.
  • Hide or “lose” records that could support compensation cases.
  • Offer token financial settlements that don’t even cover the cost of therapy for one month.

Instead of Social services departments acknowledging their duty of care. Many local authorities act as though they are defending themselves in a lawsuit, even when the claimant was once a child under their protection. The system that caused the harm then becomes the system that fights to prevent its repair.

Every denial saves the authority money, but costs the survivor another piece of peace.

The Economic Silence Around State Harm

The state speaks proudly of “corporate parenting,” but refuses to take true accountability.

When a child in care is abused, neglected, or left unsupported, the injury is not just emotional, it’s physical, psychological, and financial.
Yet there is no compensation scheme, no dedicated trauma fund, and no therapy guarantee for care-experienced people.
Even when redress schemes exist, they are bureaucratic, retraumatizing, and often exclude those who suffered institutional abuse without “sufficient evidence.” Often evidence is reliant on whether you can get access to files, kept and distributed by local authorities.

So survivors pay.
They pay in therapy bills, lost income, and reduced life expectancy.
They pay in silence, because the same system that harmed them dictates the language of their healing.

Lifelong Impact, Lifelong Costs

Complex PTSD reshapes the brain’s responses to stress, trust, and safety. It’s not a temporary wound — it’s a rewiring of survival instincts. Symptoms can reappear decades later: panic attacks, depression, chronic illness, and relationship difficulties. Each episode brings new costs, prescriptions, therapy, unpaid leave, extra care — and no public support system designed to absorb that burden.

The cruel irony is that trauma reduces your ability to earn, while recovery demands that you spend more than you can afford.

The System That Profits From Silence

There’s a quiet economy built around trauma — professionals, therapists, agencies — necessary but inaccessible to those most harmed. Survivors from care backgrounds must navigate forms, apply for grants, and justify their suffering to access partial support.

Meanwhile, social care departments protect their reputations through non-disclosure agreements, limited settlements, and institutional denial. They ensure survivors remain dependent on fragmented welfare systems, which offer survival, not healing. It’s structural neglect reframed as personal failure.

Toward a Just Model of Care and Repair

If the UK truly recognised the human cost of trauma, it would:

  • Provide lifelong access to trauma-informed therapy for all care-experienced adults.
  • Recognise CPTSD and abuse-related disabilities as grounds for financial support.
  • Create a national monitored trauma fund or redress scheme for those harmed in care.
  • Enforce transparency and accountability in abuse investigations.
  • Treat recovery as a collective responsibility, not an individual expense.

Because the price of healing should not be borne by those who were already failed.

Conclusion: The Debt Society Owes

Every therapy bill, every unpaid day, every sleepless night represents a form of unacknowledged restitution the survivor pays to themselves — because the system refuses to.

Children in care should not have to grow into adults who must buy back their well-being from the very state that broke it. If the state can afford to raise a child, it can afford to repair what it allowed to be damaged.

Healing should never depend on income. It should be part of justice.

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The Inheritance of Files: How the State Turned Guardianship into Surveillance

Posted on October 21, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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When Trauma Meets Bureaucracy: Living with CPTSD in a System That Doesn’t Understand It

Posted on October 19, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

There is something uniquely exhausting about living with Complex PTSD, not just the symptoms themselves, but the constant negotiation with systems that don’t understand them. The very institutions that claim to protect and support people with disabilities or trauma-related conditions, often become another obstacle to survival.

CPTSD is not a neat illness that fits into a tick-box form. It’s the consequence of prolonged trauma, years of hypervigilance, betrayal, and fear that shape how the nervous system works. It doesn’t move in straight lines. One day you might manage tasks with calm precision; the next, you can barely get out of bed, or speak. The body remembers danger even when the mind tries to move on.

But systems like the Department for Work and Pensions are built on predictability and proof — not on lived reality. They ask for “evidence” that can be measured, scanned, or documented. Trauma doesn’t leave medical scans. It leaves exhaustion, fragmented memory, and a body that alternates between fight, flight, and collapse. Yet when you explain that to a bureaucratic system, you’re often met with disbelief.

The DWP, like many public systems, is designed to assess compliance, not complexity. It measures how well you can fill out a form, attend appointments, or explain yourself in a ten-minute call. None of those things reflect the actual impact of CPTSD — in fact, they often trigger it. Being questioned under pressure, having to “prove” suffering, or being threatened with sanctions can recreate the same fear, power imbalance, and shame that defined childhood trauma. The system doesn’t see that, it only sees a “non-compliant claimant.”

Every survivor who’s lived through systemic failure knows this pattern. The tone of the letters, the deadlines, the cold official language, mimics the control and disbelief we grew up with. For people with CPTSD, this isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s re-traumatisation by policy. The stress of the process can cause weeks of physical illness, dissociation, or shutdown. And when the system’s response to that collapse is punishment or removal of support, it doesn’t just ignore trauma, it deepens it.

The greatest barrier isn’t laziness or lack of willingness. It’s that the system demands a kind of consistency that trauma has taken from us. We can be articulate and high-functioning in one moment, then unable to speak the next. The same system that praises “resilience” uses it against us, as evidence that we don’t need help. But surviving isn’t the same as thriving. Functioning through trauma doesn’t mean the trauma or triggers are gone.

This is why trauma-informed practice isn’t optional; it’s essential. Every staff member in welfare systems should understand what CPTSD is. They should understand how it affects communication, and why pushing for compliance without compassion perpetuates harm. Until that happens, people with CPTSD will continue to fall through the cracks, but because the system refuses to adapt.

I have experienced it personally. I’ve seen how procedures, red tape, and “evidence criteria” can erase the reality of living with trauma. I’ve felt what it’s like to be punished for the very symptoms that define the condition. That’s why I keep speaking about it, not because it’s easy, but because staying silent allows systems to stay the same.

CPTSD is a disability that affects energy, memory, and emotion, it’s also a story of survival. The DWP and other public bodies need to stop treating trauma survivors as administrative problems and start listening to us as experts in our own lives. Understanding trauma isn’t charity. It’s justice. And until that understanding is built into policy, survivors will continue to pay the emotional cost of a system that refuses to see what it has helped create.

Adults who experienced abuse in local authority care, should not have to live life baring the local authorities burden of failure. It is unfair and unjust, and the system set up to be of help, isn’t equipped for the circumstance.

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The Barriers of Red Tape: How Systems Silence Survivors

Posted on October 12, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

One of the most damaging parts of surviving abuse is not only what was done to you. it’s what follows when you try to tell the truth. The act of speaking out requires courage.

Seeking justice, understanding, or even basic acknowledgment often encounters resistance. This resistance comes from the very systems that were meant to protect you. What is described as “procedure,” “policy,” or “safeguarding” too often becomes a barrier. Instead of amplifying a survivor’s voice, it filters, edits, or erases it. This is done in the name of protection, but it protects the institution, not the child.

Across child welfare, social care, and even the digital world, this red tape creates an invisible network of control. It dictates what can be said, how it must be phrased, and who is deemed “credible.” It decides which words are acceptable and which truths are “too uncomfortable” to acknowledge. In doing so, it sends a message to survivors that their reality must be sanitized before it can be heard.

Survivors of abuse, particularly those failed within the care system, already carry the burden of betrayal. To then face bureaucratic silence or institutional editing adds a second layer of harm. The truth becomes conditional, allowed only if it fits within predefined rules or tone. Yet those who created the conditions for the abuse are rarely held to the same standard of restraint or scrutiny.

Red tape manifests in many forms.

  1. It appears in case files that go missing or are rewritten.
  2. It exists in investigations that admit “failures of duty” but deny liability, and statutory rights.
  3. It lives in compensation systems that quantify lifelong trauma into a token gesture.
  4. And it extends into online spaces. Automated filters and algorithms limit how survivors can describe their own experiences. They label them as “graphic” or “unsafe” even when written responsibly and with purpose.

These mechanisms may be designed with good intentions. For example, to protect audiences, to prevent exploitation, or to maintain professionalism. Yet they also have an unintended consequence: they silence survivors, they obstruct truth, and they reinforce shame. When truth becomes administratively inconvenient, systems turn away from it.

The reality is that lived experience cannot always be softened or made comfortable. Abuse in childhood is not abstract — it is violent, confusing, and devastating in its impact. The language required to describe it truthfully will never be easy to read, but it is necessary. Survivors should not have to dilute their stories to make others feel safe.

There is a crucial distinction between sensationalism and honesty. Survivors are not seeking to shock, we are seeking to be understood. The rawness of words is not violence; it is evidence. It is testimony of what happens when oversight fails, when care becomes neglect, and when systems prioritize reputation over responsibility.

When truth is censored, edited, or limited, it does not disappear; it simply goes unheard. And when survivors are silenced, the same conditions that enabled their abuse remain unchallenged.
Honesty is not dangerous. Silence is.

This is why survivor-led spaces matter. They create room for stories to exist in their full, unfiltered reality. They remind the world that trauma cannot be managed through public relations or redacted documents. They expose the gaps between what institutions claim to do and what they actually protect.

Speaking openly is about reclaiming agency. It is about dismantling the systems that decide when and how a survivor is “allowed” to speak. It is about refusing to carry the burden of other people’s discomfort. It is about holding systems accountable to the reality actual lived.

Even here, in digital spaces where help is offered and care is promised, those same limits exist. Automated moderation and strict policies can unintentionally mimic the very culture of silence survivors have fought for years to escape. The red tape follows you everywhere. It’s in bureaucratic offices, in courtrooms, in our records, and even in our attempts to share our own truths online.

But we must persist. Every survivor who speaks their truth; without permission; apology; or disguise, reclaims something that was taken from them. Each word breaks a link in the chain of systemic silence. Each testimony serves as evidence. It shows that what was hidden is real. The systems built to contain truth cannot hold it forever.

This is why I will continue to write, and to tell my story as it is, raw, unfiltered, and exact.
Not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. Because red tape may control process, but it will never control truth.

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Local Authority Failures, and Statutory Obligations

Posted on October 11, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

I want to talk about statutory obligation because during my time in care, there were many failures. I tried multiple times to make statutory complaints about my care while in childhood, and as an adult. Every single time I was intentionally shut down against guidelines, by Social Services paid employees, and managers.

To discuss one failure, which I have been working through the last few days to understand more.

1. My experience — being silenced and disbelieved

When I first approached social services (around 2013) and again in 2019–2020, they should not have dismissed my complaint just because:

  • I were an adult, and
  • my abuse happened when I were a child, and
  • they claimed “no one knew at the time.”

Those statements are wrong in both law and practice.

Being told “we can’t investigate because it’s historic or you didn’t disclose at the time”.Contradicts the Children Act 1989, the Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure (England) Regulations 2006. Also the national statutory guidance “Getting the Best from Complaints” (DfE, 2006).

Under the circumstance of sexual abuse, I retained the right to a full statutory investigation (Stage 2) as long as:

  • I were complaining about events that happened when you were a child. Who was receiving children’s services (looked-after child, foster care, etc.); and
  • the issues raised were about care, protection, or abuse while under the local authority’s duty of care.

It doesn’t matter that I am now an adult, because the right attaches to the period of childhood. Not your current age.

💠 2. What the Council was legally required to do

When I made my complaint on 10 June 2019, clearly stating it was a formal statutory complaint under the Children Act 1989, the Council was obliged by law to:

  1. Accept it under the statutory process (Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure (England) Regulations 2006).
  2. Appoint an Independent Investigator and an Independent Person to oversee Stage 2.
  3. Provide a formal Stage 2 report and adjudication letter.
  4. Allow escalation to Stage 3 (Review Panel) if I were dissatisfied with Stage 2 findings or remedy.

Instead, what they did was:

  • Initially refuse in 2013, claiming it was “out of time.”
  • In 2019, only agreed to a non-statutory investigation, after I pushed for it.
  • In 2020, refused me access to Stage 3, calling their Stage 2 response “final.”

That was unlawful, because:

  • Under Regulation 17(2) of the 2006 Regulations, an authority must convene a Review Panel. When requested by the complainant after a Stage 2 adjudication.
  • A refusal to do so breaches Regulation 17 and paragraphs 3.12–3.13 of Getting the Best from Complaints.
  • The statutory guidance also states that even historic or complex cases. Must follow the statutory process if they relate to the complainant’s time as a child in care.
  • A local authority cannot replace the statutory process with an “internal” or “non-statutory” process.

💠 3. Why this matters legally

This failure breached:

  • Statutory duty under the Children Act 1989 and 2006 Regulations.
  • Article 3 and Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. (right to protection from degrading treatment and right to respect for private/family life).
  • Common law duty of fairness. (the right to be heard, and to have a complaint properly determined under the correct legal framework).
  • Public law principles; the council acted ultra vires (beyond its legal powers) by refusing access to a mandatory statutory process.
  • The refusal also caused psychological harm by retraumatizing, effectively repeating the same pattern of disbelief that caused the original injury.

In a civil context, this strengthens:

  • Breach of statutory duty (failure to follow mandatory child protection procedures, both historically and in the complaint handling).
  • Aggravated damages — because the Council’s refusal compounded the trauma and delayed access to justice.

Knowledge is Power

I am hoping this information helps someone else out there who is going through something similar. I hope i gives you knowledge and power in fighting your care, and understanding some of your legal rights. At the time I did not understand mine, and the result is I didn’t get them in full.

Any child who was sexually abused in care, whether historical or current, is entitled to an investigation. This investigation is statutory nature and is set out under the law, for exactly these types of scenarios. Institutions not adhering guide should be reported to parliament, and relevant government bodies.

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Fostering for Purpose Vs Financial Gain.

Posted on October 11, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

Fostering is a good will job, that requires skill, time and a lot of energy. Good foster parents deserve financial support and help when fostering children. Children are expensive, and giving up your life to give someone else a fairer start should be rewarded.

It is just sad that in a world where a serious service is needed, it is exploited sometimes. There are people out there who see it as a mean to pay for their own lifestyle, and expenses. Fostering can be made into a lucrative job.

Today in the UK, an average fostering fee per child is around £480 per week per foster child. The foster parent that I think was involved in trafficking in 1992, had 4 girls at a time. Today 4 girl between ages 12 and 17 would equal £7680 per month, and 92k plus per year. On some fostering sites, pay averages £42k plus per year for 2 children. Fostering multiple children for those with sinister intentions, can easily buy a home and car with cash from fostering children.

Aside from the cash checks, there are paid for holidays during the year, with spending money. Pocket money, and clothing money. Pay is also mainly tax free. There can be lots of other perks, like money off of activities, and other things. Traveling expenses, school expenses, pocket money and birthday and Christmas gift and activity money etc. There is no reason a foster child should leave care with mostly the clothing on their backs.

With the right motive, fostering can be beneficial for looked after children, but there is an easily exploited dark side. I know that my records are riddled with foster parents asking for more money. One foster parent kept asking for money for a bike, I left her home without that bike. I left most placements without even basic weekly clothing. I had like 2 shirts for school. 1 skirt, 1 pair of shoes etc. I had no toys or kid like possessions. I rarely got pocket money in foster placements, despite it being provided. And in children’s homes, they would use pocket money sanctions for behavior, and control.

Money is a large part of fostering, the right balance can be beneficial for everyone. Simple things like making sure that a child at least leaves with their toys and things from each placement. Not a black bag with whatever can be thrown inside like trash. Children should be leaving care with things bought with money, ask for on their behalf, as the very least.

Also accounts often opened by foster parents get left behind too. I had a post office account that had money in that went missing. I never found it. Money and financial gain, and advantage needs to be discussed and managed in foster care. There should be a gain for foster parents, nonetheless the main advantage should be for the child.

Has anyone else experienced abuse in any Church of England Primary Schools during the 80s or 90s in England, UK? anyone else experienced abuse in foster care in general in UK or outside of UK. If so feel free to comment, or email me to share information.

Sharing information is important, because people in authorities wont affirm the trauma they cause. Only we can do that by aligning our experiences, and putting the political dots together and making our own outcomes. Also through speaking about beneficial pathways, of recovery and burdens. Silence only lets bad policies, and practices that cause harm to continue, unheard, ignored and unaccounted for.

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Foster Placement 6 *trigger warning*

Posted on October 9, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

Please read placement number 6 before reading placement 6 *trigger warning*. this post is a part two, and has a part one.

As I stated in part one, the foster mother was fake, manipulative and somewhat sadistic in her mannerisms. She used foster children as cash cows to help her own family, it was never about the act of kindness. We were openly told, that we are foster children and do not get the same things as their own children. We deserve less, and should be grateful, otherwise there was hostility and bad treatment. Being sent to bed early so they can have family time, was an every night occurrence. It was a way to show you, you were an outsider and not part of their family. As a foster child, I just adapted to each families character and lifestyle.

Eight weeks after my 13th birthday, I was told we were going on holiday. It was an all paid inclusive holiday for the whole family and foster children, paid by social care. Again I was excited, because by adapting, I enjoyed watching her treatment of her own children. I was good the whole time I was there, which was just the first night, playing with the youngest children. Whom I liked best because they were not bullies as much as the older two.

On the second day of the holiday, the foster mother told me I have to go back. When I asked her why? She said, “because a watch went missing from the swimming pool changing rooms”. We hadn’t done any activities yet, so I didn’t even know where the pool was. It was early morning on the first day, and all we had done was check in the evening before. Confused and upset, I started to shout loudly and protest I done nothing wrong.

She started to look around at who was watching, and then bent down in my ear and said to me. I know it wasn’t you, but the other child who was older than me, cant go home alone. So can I take care of her, and I was really upset, but agreed. She told me I would be staying with temporary foster careers until they get back from holiday. Which meant that this foster mother got to spend an all inclusive paid for holiday, with her children, and husband. Also her sister and her sisters child for a week. The only two foster children there sent home. At the time all I saw was that the other foster child was to blame, and was angry with her.

On the way home, the older teen took me to some house, which I thought was the foster family. I saw her sexually assaulted by a male, and taken to another room. After some time she was brought back, and then he said she was going. So I stayed and expected that the temporary foster parents would look after me until the other ones came back. I was confused and scared, by things I saw, but had no control. I was told by the foster mum it was temporary foster parents so didn’t question, who the strangers were. When asked if I would like something to drink by an old lady with grey hair. I took the drink she offered to me without hesitation because she is supposed to feed me.

I was drugged by that drink I accepted without a thought of danger. I was then sexually assaulted while unconscious, and while awake, and was almost trafficked out of Bristol by two males. I remember assaults by two males, not sure if there were more when I was unconscious. One in a dark room I couldn’t see his face, who forced me to preform sex acts. He was violent and also struck me in the face multiple times. The other I woke up to face down on a bed, assaulting me before I went back unconscious. I was kept unconscious most of the time.

Apart from the man and lady I saw initially when taken there. I did not see one facial feature after that, it was like they were hiding their faces from me. In hindsight I think I was kept awake for the person in the dark, for the act they wanted. The darkness I think was used as a way to keep identities secret. But I saw that one was dark haired and one was lighter haired and they were white males. The lady and man I did see initially were also white. I had no idea at all I was being trafficked, and that the house was a suspected trafficking house. I remember feeling lost when I first went inside because the house was large with many floors. Even with the abuse, I didn’t process it as trafficking until I was in my late 30s.

At some point the people I was trafficked to, decided to move me, and I was drugged. I escaped by jumping out of the moving car, and then running and hiding under a parked car. Whatever drug they were giving me, wore off and I pretended to still be unconscious. I watched them in the front seat for a while, while they spoke. Until my instinct told me to try the door and jump if its open. I heard them searching for me, and talking to each other before they gave up. I heard ” we are fucked if we don’t find her”, and “lets go”. Luckily it was dark, so they couldn’t see me. I was terrified, and hid for at least an hour in the dirt under the car.

When I eventually felt safe enough to come out, i did not know where I was, and just started walking. When I saw streets with lights on them, I walked towards it, and started seeing people and cars. I looked at my reflection, and my face i did not recognize, it felt hot, and I started crying. A woman with black hair saw me and took me home. I stayed with her until a missing person alert was put out, and she took me back. She told me to not identify her, as the alert had threatened to charge people with kidnap, and charges. I never said a word to social services when I went back. I just smiled, and felt good that someone had cared about me.

In hindsight, I strongly believe the foster mother and maybe the father set me up to be trafficked. The sister who was on the holiday was involved, as she in records corroborating her sisters false story. Social services files claim I ran away. I did not run away. I was set up and taken to a house where I was then drugged and assaulted. My foster mother told me that I was being taken to temporary foster parents. She did not mention that social services would meet and collect us both. She also did not follow social cares guidance, in not sending us back alone on a train. Records showed me she had to have an ulterior motive for the picture she painted. Which resulted in me being taken to a trafficking house and left there, to be sexually abused and drugged.

Social care, I feel doctored my files to look like I was seen, while I was missing. I believe for their own institutional protection, image and professional work positions. Aside from my own memory, there were inconsistent records around this period, and all other files are consistent. There were daily records, and then a gap of around 3 weeks appears with only one entry. There are also three different records related to the day I came home on the train from the holiday. Multiple social workers claim to have picked me up from the train station, the day I was trafficked. Of which other records claim those social workers were elsewhere at the time on records. Also three sets of people cant pick up one child, and take them different places.

Also, all entries of suspected sexual abuse was not in my records. How does that happen, and how do social care teams get away with that? Multiple records were found in other peoples files that were directly about me. I feel was intentional and evidence of an active cover up. The Investigation was in 2020, which to me points to it being a a current issue. As the character of social care are still to deflect and deny, based on evidence they actively covered up.

In reality, a statutory investigation finds you guilty of failing in duty, and that sexual abuse was highly probable. Also, directly spoken about by multiple staff for around 5 years in records. Your response is to offer 1000 for injury, adding insult. Then to deny anything happened at all, and fight against me, because I refused your insulting offer. This is after ignoring disclosures of abuse, and not acting when directly told multiple times, at different points in childhood. In my opinion it was not just a failure. It was neglect and emotional abuse to not act for years. It was a conscious act of mitigation, by the very people paid to advocate children’s rights. The systematic character assassination that always follows sexual abuse in foster care, is also a controlled response. That can be later used by social care legal teams to justify and mitigate their practices, towards children.

For example, my records talk about me blowing up one day, and being all sorts of out of control, aggressive. That poor other children had to watch me blow up, and throw things, and cry. That day I cried and blew up because I was sexually assaulted, and behind my back I was called promiscuous. So given no support and help at age 12, I had a mental health breakdown. Because not long prior I was assaulted by someone else. And before that assaulted by someone else. I kept getting assaulted from age 8 years, and could do nothing about who I was sent to live with. I was expected to eat with an appetite, at the same table as one of my rapist. At the time the care was disgusting, and staff were self-absorbed, and told lies to protect their own purposes. Only reading my records later exposed more lies, once I had processed my own feelings, and experiences, without hindrances.

In my opinion the UK National Child Abuse Investigation and study, only changed attitudes within the authorities it targeted. The ones not targeted were allowed to just watch. Local authorities not targeted can use the opportunity only to mitigate any backlash they would get in the aftermath. It will always be about mitigating any financial loss to compensation before anything else. The children who grow up affected are expected to bare the burden, both financially and otherwise. In the UK the welfare system does not adhere to any local authority abuse failures that impact lives. Its a ‘if you are lucky enough to find a route to help’, type of thing. The help is often mottled with fierce opposition, and does not really cater to the unusual circumstance. One in which you are harmed by a local authority care, and there is no recourse. There is no clear established nation wide route for these groups to get umbrellaed support, considering its systemic institutional nature. Which thanks to the UK national study is now widely known about, though more effective in targeted areas.

Did you know that another victim in the same facility or family is evidence, regardless if you know each other? In fact victims who do not know each other, but are abused in the same placement is solid court evidence? Hopefully in the future we can build a data base of institutional placements where people experienced abuse. So it can be used to help victims corroborate abuse, which is often done in private.

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Placement Number 6

Posted on October 8, 2025 by societyshiddensecret

The family who lived in placement number 6, were foster parents whom had four biological sons. This family fostered up to four girls at a time, mainly from biracial backgrounds. The foster children slept on bunk beds in one room with a double wardrobe, chest of drawers and a mirror. I am glad I was not with this woman long, but her treatment of me had lasting impact.

I remember vividly on her sons birthday, she gave him a whole room renovation. I was excited that she was that type of mom, I thought she was a cool mom. Maybe I should not have expected something nice on my birthday, which was soon after her bio sons birthday. But at aged 12 I was excited and naive. I thought I would get a nice gift, as a child who barely kept anything but a few clothes. I didn’t even imagine what it was, but that it would be a nice birthday surprise.

On my birthday, she ignored me all day. I hovered around hoping to be noticed, hoping she forgot about it. After feeling sad, defeated and confused. She eventually way in the afternoon, said she had something for me, there was a small glimmer of hope. She gave me a pair of unwrapped socks and underwear. I said thank you but I was really disappointed. She had this big grin that spread widely across her face, while staring at me. It was creepy, and I struggled to read her behavior. After more time passed, she gave me £40 from social services, for my birthday. Making it clear that it was not a gift from her, and that I should go out to spend it.

I went out, got on the bus to find my sister at her foster parents house. She was babysitting, and I stayed with her and the four younger children, who were the foster parents children. My sister was often left babysitting and caring for the bio children. Her foster mother used to spent all the foster money on rentals and going out partying. I eventually left my sisters house, and on the way home an alcoholic on the bus collapsed. When they took him off, they left his alcohol bag right near me. So being depressed, being isolated, feeling let down and sad on my birthday. I thought I am gonna drink this bottle of drink. It was red wine, and I drank about three quarters of the bottle. I had never drank alcohol before!

When it was my stop, I fell out the bus door on the floor, struggling to walk. My foster parents lived about 10 minutes away from the bus stop. I was so drunk, I kept waking up on the floor after blacking out unconscious. Many people saw me, no one asked if I was okay, and I eventually made it home. The foster mother was verbally angry, and sent me to bed. In the morning she complained I broke off the door handle, while struggling to open the door. She played the angry foster parent part, making her little notes for social services. She did not tell social services it was on my birthday, to hide what she did. Instead she made out like it was on a different day, and that I had gone out without encouragement. Social services took her word for the incident, and did not ask me what my experience was.

In the most part foster parents can say what they like, without question, or the voice of the child. In the most part children in care are groomed to reciprocate what the adults wants their institution to represent. Which meant when I complained, my complaints not only fell on deaf ears, but were filed as untrue. This meant that I was systemically neglected and treated with bias by paid professionals, who felt I was the problem. And neglected to acknowledge the bigger picture and contributing factors, when it suited them. It undoubtedly leads to some of the failures faced by abused foster children within the care system. More importantly is a contributing factor in a lack of accountability which impacts future opportunities.

Furthermore, foster parents get paid extra money to do birthday party’s and get presents for foster kids. There was no reason for her not to make an effort, other than she wanted to do nothing intentionally. Her buying a pair of socks and underwear was an act of humiliation and spite, after ignoring me all day. She did not even wish me happy birthday, it was to much effort for her. She wanted us as foster children to know we were less important than her children. She used it as a way to boost their ego, and make them feel superior and important. Her grin was her enjoying her emotional abuse of me, which she got off on. Her husband was a NPC in her daily fostering endeavors, aside from the financial advantage he received.

I on the other hand barely had any clothes, in foster care. For the monthly clothing allowance I was supposed to get, I remember picking out trainers one time. It was not while I was placed in this placement either, it was while at a children’s home. She was paid enough to buy me a cake and a gift. She was greedy and was using kids as cash cows, with immunity. I was wrong for taking the alcohol on the bus, and getting drunk. But she was manipulative, and spiteful. She told partial truths to sound sincere. Her telling social services I went out and got drunk, sounds very problematic, and poor old me. She didn’t tell the whole truth. Which was that she pocketed at more than half of the birthday funds, and did nothing for my birthday. She then sent me out, after ignoring me all day.

I would say she should feel ashamed, but something tells me she was a narcissistic psychopath, who wouldn’t care. The grin that would spread across her face, with her eyes bulging out of her sockets, staring at you. It felt almost like she was feeding off of your energy and soul. People have this weird stare, that they do when they are being manipulative intentionally, and watching it play out. Its like they get some type of chemical release of dopamine from doing spiteful things to other people. They enjoy watching it play out, and enjoy watching the confusion, and negative reactions. I believe she became a foster parent to solely use foster children for money, and to finance her own family. All inclusive holidays, spending money, four sets of birthday moneys you don’t give to the child. Plus basic pay, and financial perks. She never fostered boys, only girls that her biological sons had no competition with.

Another memory that stand out, is when I asked why the adult biological son was so mean to me. She said it was because he had slept with the prior biracial foster child/teen. After I asked where the girl was now, at the time. The foster mother told me the girl went missing. She had the big grin and stare, and I felt fearful of her disclosure. I was mixed race or biracial as people call it, and I already had a traumatic experience in foster care. Her intentions were sinister in the disclosure, she wanted me intimidated, but i was socially slow. Her demeanor would change around social service professionals. She acted more kind and also pretended to be attentive, when she was really not attentive or kind at all.

Its been over 20 years since I lived in placement number 6, and I still think about the ‘missing girl’. I wonder who she was, where she is, if she was found or if she was trafficked and never found. The worst part is no one cared, there was no one to approach about it, no one to investigate. I wonder who else knew the foster parents were trafficking teen girls, and who was profiting from it. I wonder how many girls “went missing or “ran away” before I was placed there. It really is unacceptable that foster children are targeted and used by inside organized criminal groups, without consequence. It is even worse that the very people paid to protect you, are not adhering to guidelines. Often directly due to their own personal biases and opinions, which is then projected onto victims of abuse.

For example, when social care found out I was abused at the young age of 9-10 years old. Instead of support adult themes of sexuality was projected onto me. It was abuse by an adult male, in a foster placement. I was not the only child who complained of sexual abuse, two other foster children complained too. In records, staff made comments of lies; imaginations; sexually inappropriate feelings towards men, a risk to innocent men…! Staff spoke about you, not to you directly about abuse suffered. It was like an unspoken knowledge, in which you the child felt crazy because no one acknowledged your pain.

I am healing, but writing about my lived experience makes my blood boil, in instances where staff in my opinion. Actively made decisions that caused multiple children harm, and ignored plea’s for help. To me when reading records, words and opinions of staff. There was a direct correlation to the outcome of children in care, as they made abused children the problem.

Part two, to be continued on another post.

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