Carol

After the removal the violence and the damage began in earnest.

Carol. The later physical violence. The destruction of belongings. Being told I reminded her of Steven. The impact of those years is still in the body. The emotional life that other children seemed to develop on schedule simply did not arrive. Feelings remained something I observed in other people rather than something I possessed. The emotional intelligence of a goldfish, I used to say later when I finally had language for it. It was not numbness exactly. It was the absence of something that had never been given the conditions to grow. I watched other children cry or laugh or get angry and I understood the words for those things but I did not feel them in the same way. That absence became a kind of armour and a kind of prison at the same time. Armour because nothing could reach the centre. Prison because the centre itself remained unreachable even to me.

I carried it alone. For decades. There was no one to tell and no language that would have been believed if I had found the words.

Attempts to report historic abuse to police stations across the United Kingdom — London and as far as Scotland — were refused. At some stations I was forcibly removed. At one, a perpetrator was informed of the contents of my statement by the officers I had trusted with it. That is the institutional response I received as a child and as an adult trying to give an account of what had been done. The message was clear and repeated: your account is inconvenient. Your account threatens people who are protected. Your account will not be recorded. The system that had already failed to protect the child now failed to record the adult’s testimony about that failure.

These are not the worst details. There is more. The full account remains in my hands until the legal advice is clear and the moment is right. I will not put the most serious material on the page for the sake of word count or dramatic effect. When it comes it will come with the full force it deserves and with proper protection around it. Until then the impact is what I can place on the record: the absence of ordinary emotional development, the institutional refusals, the long solitude of carrying something that official channels did not want to know.