It was in early 2020 that I received the first few fragments of my care records from my local council. They arrived in an email, with a secure link to a server where I could download a pdf of documents that had been collated, redacted and scanned. I often imagine that these documents were sitting in the forgotten basement of some council building in Guildford. Maybe a civil servant had to find a torch and descend a set of concrete steps into the dark, brush the cobwebs away from the cabinet and jimmy it open with a crowbar to undertake the labour of reading, sorting, censoring and digitising each page of information kept about me. If so, they might have been there a while. The collection of documents anatomising my state guardianship spanned more than two decades.
Even before I decided to ask for them, I knew that the files would be altered: the Information Governance department at Surrey county council, like all local councils, owes a duty of confidentiality to third parties. I knew that could include members of my biological family, social workers, teachers, foster carers, or foster siblings. I knew that I would be receiving mutated data: bits and pieces of stories, fragments of memories that had been taken apart and put back together.
I was lucky, really, that I could get to it at all: 30,000 children enter the care system every year, each with their own file filled with their life history, just like mine. But few care leavers will ever see these files. The process of accessing them is lengthy and needlessly bureaucratic. I have friends whose files have been lost or destroyed, leaving them with no records of their childhood whatsoever.
Still, the first data dump, when I received it in 2020, more than a year after my initial subject access request, took me by surprise. I was 26 and still living with the parents who had fostered me and my elder brother from the ages of two and four, respectively, in the bedroom I had spent my adolescence in, with the same 1970s swirly purple carpet that had been laid when the house was built.
When the email arrived, I called my mum into the room: she sat down with me on my bed, both of us quiet with nervous anticipation. We had talked about asking for the data: my foster mother (whom I consider to be my mum) supported me, but also warned me of the way the records might make me feel. Learning the ugly details of my early childhood for the first time might recover traumatic memories. My brother, who had moved out by then, had no interest in accessing his records; I knew that to ask him about our story would re-traumatise him, since with two years’ seniority he remembered so many more horrifying details than I did. I had to do this on my own.
“You don’t have to read them,” Mum told me gently. “You can put them in a box under your bed and forget about them. You can keep them safe; you can put them in the loft; you can give them to someone you trust for safekeeping until you’re ready.”
She was right: there was no real need for me to drag up a past (the parts of it I remembered) that I had spent countless hours in therapy as a teenager processing in healthy and harmless ways, and then burying. But the idea that there were huge swathes of my own history that I could recover simply by obtaining these documents, to which I was entitled, was deeply appealing. I had grown up troubled and often miserable. I felt strongly that by identifying and collecting the missing puzzle pieces of my past, I would be able to look forward to my future as a more complete person.
“I want to read them,” I told my mum. “I think I’m ready.”
I have always been acutely aware that I have never really known the full story of how I was taken into care. I know that my brother and I were taken by social services from an abusive family situation, and were fostered together. It’s unusual for siblings to be kept together in the care system, so I count us both very lucky for that small mercy. We were also lucky to live in a long-term placement: a loving, stable, safe home where we were treated like members of the family; a family whose surname I took by deed poll, and whom I lived with until last year, only moving out because the property price downturn of the pandemic meant that I could at last afford to buy.
There are a few things I remember from the very early years of my life: the memory of being afraid of everything, a clingy child who constantly needed attention from adults. I remember Christmas in our first short-term placement with our foster carers’ two giant greyhounds. I still have the presents we were given that Christmas: beaded necklaces, and a soft toy Simba from The Lion King. The memories my brain has decided to retain are the happier ones: joyful moments spent with my brother, days with ice-cream at the beach and climbing trees on holiday in Cornwall with my new family. But the picture has always been far from complete.
When I was aged between five and 12, my social workers used a set of storytelling exercises called Life Story Work, designed to help children who have experienced trauma to fill the gaps in their memory and understanding. It helped me piece together some of the fragments I had of my early childhood: images of our first family home, and the day we were taken away from that home. But in terms of the details, my memory fails me. I know some of the story, of course, but social workers left out the most shocking parts: details that I only understood years later through re-examining the little information I had, and prodding my foster parents for more.
Eventually, I pieced together the nature and some of the details of the abuse we suffered. I understand that no adult wants to explain to a little girl what her biological mother did to trigger a section 31 care order, legislation that instructs a local authority to assume parental responsibility for a child, due to risk of harm. How do you explain abuse and mental illness to a child? When I got older and a little more clued up on the care system, I understood that the “official line” of social services throughout my childhood (“Mummy can’t look after you because she’s not very well”) was the coded language of a much darker truth.
This growing sense of a secret at the heart of my identity slowly devastated me, and the weight of it bore down on me through my teenage years. I was rebellious: I broke the house rules and lied to my parents about where I was and what I was doing. I started smoking at 12, first tobacco and later marijuana. I self-harmed, which led to therapy. It was only with the help of counselling that I began to process this unresolved trauma and make some effort to move forward with my life, which I eventually did. With the support of my foster family, and especially my mother, I made it through college and went on to study creative writing at university. I ended up submitting my PhD thesis in 2019; something I would never have been able to do without them.
But the slow and laborious task of becoming more comfortable with living in my own skin, of developing an identity, aspirations, goals and dreams for myself, didn’t negate the sense of something lost – the black vacuum in the centre of my being that represented my own missing history.
In my bedroom with my mum, I felt the threat of what the documents held hang thick in the air between us. We opened the file together. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had certainly never imagined what I found. I scrolled through the pages of documentation (almost 600, altogether) and felt sick to my stomach. Huge swathes of text had been redacted. Not just other people’s names and personal information, it seemed. As I scrolled, I saw that there were sections of 10, 20, 30 pages that were entirely blank, with a little note in red at the top of the page – “third party” – indicating that this data was not mine and I was therefore not entitled to it.
I was dumbfounded: appalled by the level of censorship applied to my own history. While I was in shock, my mother was furious. “How could they do this to you?” she demanded. “It’s your life. It’s your story. They have no right to take it away.”
I was completely sympathetic to the need to protect others’ personal information – phone numbers and addresses. What I couldn’t fathom was what could possibly be sitting behind the full white pages of redaction, hundreds of them, where not a single piece of the original document remained. Whole sections of my young life had been cut away, secrets hidden behind the redactor’s white blocks and GDPR legislation. I estimate that up to 90% of that first data dump (and the stories it told about my care experience, and my young life) were gone.
My mum and I read what little remained together: small fragments and anecdotes about my childhood, supervised contact visits at age three or four with my biological parents; school reports and medical records; details of a fight I had with my brother; the fact that I liked to play with dolls and put on singing and dancing shows for my foster family. My mum loved reading through these snippets, giggling at the memories of me as a toddler, headstrong and mischievous. “A right madam,” she always called me, and she said it again now. There were accounts of particular incidents that my mum could add colour to, beyond the methodical, bureaucratic language. Like the time at infant school, not long after being taken into care, when I decided to steal a pair of safety scissors from the stationery trolley, take myself off to the toilets and cut off a chunk of my hair. Or, not long afterwards, my delight at being chosen to play a bumblebee at a dance recital, which meant that I got my very own tutu.
It’s been over a year since that first instalment of my care records was delivered. Once a month, Surrey county council sends another batch – sifted, redacted and scanned – as a single pdf. The new documents are no better than the first. Each file is up to 1,000 pages in length, but the overwhelming majority are blank; the ones that aren’t are so heavily censored as to be almost incomprehensible.
Of the information that remains, the reports are cold, unfeeling, reported judgments from social workers, case workers and counsellors. A report from 1996 describes how my toddler self “tests boundaries”, “tends to squabble” and has “crying/screaming temper tantrums”. In a 1999 report, when I was six, it is stated that my “aggressive behaviour has no apparent trigger”. Another from 2003 cryptically notes that “Kirsty has become challenging towards [redacted]”. In 2005, when I was 12, one social worker wrote, “Kirsty has to be reminded to brush her teeth daily and sometimes her hair appears wet but is in fact greasy”. The same report continues: “Advised [redacted] of the concerns re Kirsty lying and that a meeting had been organised to consider this.”
The reports pathologise my childhood behaviour and character in a way that, as an adult, confuses and shames me. This vision of my young self as dirty, a liar, difficult and aggressive bears no resemblance to the version of myself that I remember. The ways in which my social workers described a traumatised child make my stomach turn. Meanwhile, the questions that dogged me throughout my time in care remain unanswered.
Above all, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact there are huge chunks of memory from my earliest years that I will never recover: stories I will never hear, and a secret history of my own self I will never know. But I have to remind myself of what my care experience has given me, which on brighter days seems much more than it ever took away.
The records don’t tell the story of my family, who took in my brother and me, and treated us as their own. They don’t tell the stories of our resilience and accomplishments in the wake of trauma; the unconditional love that we share.
I don’t know when I’ll get the email to say that this is the last instalment, that the disclosure of my public records is complete and I am in full possession of my own history. It could be years.
In the meantime, I have realised that the keys to my old identity aren’t as important as the person I am now. The identity that I built for myself – a successful, sensitive, compassionate, occasionally over-sharing but loving woman – with the help of my family, my friends, and lots of self-love. That is who matters the most.
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