By Kerrie Portman

I didn’t feel love my entire childhood. I distinctly remember the first time I felt love as a young adult. The emotion was so alien to me that I didn’t know the word for it; I didn’t know it was called ‘love.’ I described it to someone as feeling like there was a warm, happy, golden kitten in my tummy.

I was removed from my parents and placed into Care, where social services and the support workers abused me further. At no point did anybody speak to me about the abuse I’d endured. Nobody took the time to explain why I’d been taken into Care. This lack of discussion resulted in a lot of issues but one of them was that I was never told I’d grown up in an abusive home. There are a lot of different forms of abuse, making it harder to recognise. When children have grown up only ever knowing abuse it’s even harder to understand – that can be all we’ve ever known. 

When nobody in social services spoke to me about why I was being taken into Care, let alone about how to spot or understand abuse, it meant I still didn’t recognise abuse. It left space for my mother to tell me that it was my fault I was taken into Care. This idea was sort of confirmed for me when I was abused in the Children’s Home and when social services paid that Home hundreds of thousands of pounds despite this mistreatment. 

Dozens of adults who were paid to care for me instead abused me too, and I understood this as confirmation I was unlovable. It further normalised abuse. I thought that’s simply how life was for everyone and therefore that’s just how life would always be. Years later I was told what I experienced in that Children’s Home was ‘child physical, emotional and sexual abuse’ and that what I experienced was ‘torture.’

In many ways, being given a language of abuse did help. It taught me that that wasn’t normal, which brought with it the possibility of an alternative. The possibility of a life free of abuse; the possibility that not everyone was abusive. But I was only told a blanket statement: that the situation was abusive. I still wasn’t taught the intricacies or details of abuse. And I certainly still wasn’t taught what non-abuse, or even love, actually looks like. 

I ignorantly thought there was a greater separation between the people who abused me as a child and the people I would encounter as an adult. I mentally ‘othered’ them, somehow assuming they wouldn’t be so easy to stumble across by accident. Or maybe I assumed I’d be better at seeing the signs. I wasn’t. As a young adult, I didn’t have family or friends or a support network who could help me navigate the complexities of relationships. 

I once fell in love with a boy and when I was articulating my love for him, a big part of that was that he felt like home. He later chose to try and force me to be near people who had assaulted me and when I said I didn’t feel safe, he ruined my life and turned everyone against me. Now I wonder if when I said he felt like home, I was recognising the people from my childhood who had abused me and that was where the sense of home and deep familiarity stemmed from. If I had a support network when I knew him, would others have picked up the red flags? There’s the old joke that people will fall in love with a partner who resembles their parents, but I was in Care. I had Corporate Parents and parental figures who abused me. 

What makes the story of the boy I fell in love with sadder is that I fell more in love with him after I grew scared of him. I knew he was hurting me, and I didn’t view that as a bad thing. When he started hating me, I felt closer to him because I hated me too. This confusion around love and familiarity extends to platonic love as well as romantic love. My friends tended to be social workers, youth workers and support workers (the same profession as people that abused and neglected me) because I felt they understood more of my past.

One particular friend who worked in social care was another case where I missed the warning signs. I was at university and had professionals who could raise concerns when I’d describe our friendship, which ultimately helped me end it, but not before significant damage was done by her exploiting me. I let her stay in my flat when she became homeless because I remember how alone I’d been when nobody had helped me when I was homeless. She took complete advantage, landing me in significant trouble with my landlord and then gossiped about me to people she’d reported to the police for fear they would kill me. 

But she also spent time with me without asking me to do anything for her and spoke about loving me and wanting to adopt me. She wasn’t all bad and that only confused me and made me doubt myself when I felt her actions were wrong. By the time I finally had support, it became a regular occurrence for me to describe treasured memories of friends and people I loved only for people to turn to me in horror and say how lucky that nothing worse had happened. Why, they asked, had I not realised a situation was wrong? 

I fear part of it was that I’d met a lot of those people when I was homeless and I didn’t want to be alone again. I once told my best friend that my biggest fear was ‘again’. I worried I’d be homeless again, I worried I’d be tortured again, I worried I’d be abused again, I worried I’d be alone again…  Eventually, I ended all the relationships with the people I met during that time when I was brutally reminded that having the wrong people can be a lot worse than having no one. 

Social workers, social services, support workers, youth workers, teachers, school staff and everyone who works with all children and young people, but especially those who work with vulnerable children and Care Leavers, need to talk to people about abuse in depth. Services need to be alert and step in sooner, so no one is so alone that they are exploited for simply wanting to be loved.

It should be standard practice for all young people. Not having these conversations, especially with those taken into Care and identified as vulnerable, is setting people up for repeating childhood cycles of unhealthy love into adulthood, when these cycles can and should be broken with effective support.