If the members look at their meeting papers, they will see an image of me when I was 12-years-old. I was petite and fragile. I am a care-experienced young person, which means that I have had experience of the care system. After assessing my life, I see that my human rights and children’s rights have not always been fulfilled—not only prior to going into care, but during care and, to an extent, now.
As a child, I was a victim of extreme violence, abuse and neglect. My home was not a safe place. There was drug and alcohol misuse around me consistently, which led to me taking drugs at the age of 10. The fridge was bare and my siblings and I had to steal for food, so my initial start to life was rough and I guess that my parent was not adhering to a lot of my rights.
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Through the issues that were happening in my home, my behaviour became difficult and challenging, which led to attention-seeking behaviour in school, and that led to me being removed from school. Instead of teachers listening to my cries for help, I was removed. At the age of 11, I had a breakdown to a social worker, and that was what it took to have me placed in care.
I thought that that would make me safe, but that was not the case. You can see the image of me as a young boy. When I was in care, restraining a child was occurring daily. It is the same for a lot of young people. By restraining, I mean physically holding and pinning a child down, and I have first-hand experience of that from when I was younger than I was in that image.
I thought that those people loved me and that I had a relationship with them, but it was not nurturing—it was actually scarring. Now that I reflect back, I know that that did not happen to my friends or my peers, and I know that their parents would not have called the police for them bringing a mattress into the hallway and jumping on it. That happened to me, and it happened to many other young people. We were handcuffed for carrying on and were put into the back of police vans.
I am grateful and thankful to be here and able to share that experience with you, because human rights and child rights are so important. I want to be an ambassador for young people who have care experience, because it is crucial for people to know more about that and to have access to further opportunities to learn about it. How do we do that? Obviously, there are a number of ways. We can do it through corporate parenting, where the Government has a responsibility to scrutinise organisations on their duties, which we feel is super important in letting care-experienced young people know their rights.
One of the amazing things that Who Cares? Scotland has done over the past 40 years is to provide independent advocacy for young people in care. We are currently the only people who do that nationally, specifically for care-experienced young people. It is relationship based, child centred, one to one, and based on a foundation of trust. It is a complete offer, and you opt into it. I believe that, if that had always been available to me when I was on the edge of care, it would have been so beneficial prior to going into the children’s hearings system.
Reflecting on my experience, I have to say that having an advocate was incredibly important in allowing me to understand and access my rights. My advocate had a lot of uniqueness, nerve and talent. He was independent from the system, and I cannot reiterate often enough just how important that is. As a child, you are presented with so many professionals who remind you that they adhere to the rules from above, so it was important to have someone there who was able to contest against what other people wanted to say for me, and who allowed me to understand my rights and exercise them. Any child going through a complex legal system such as the care system will find that they ricochet through it and that is why the outcomes are quite poor by the time they come to the end.
It is so important to reiterate how vital it is to have an advocate to build trust in a relationship-based and child-centred approach. That is the only effective way to do it, and that is fundamentally what we do. At the risk of making a public relations statement, I believe that a lot of the advocates that we have are incredible at doing that. That is how I have accessed my rights, as a lot of care-experienced young people do, and it is important to improve that provision and give a lot more young people access and recourse to it.