paedophilia
The darkest side of life
Hello, my name is Shy Keenan, I was born and broken in Birkenhead, and was abused from infancy by a network of every kind of pervert … I entered the world unwanted and was beaten, sold, swapped, photographed, filmed, left for dead, betrayed, ignored and booted into adulthood; at which point I was branded the problem and left completely on my own.
This book, Broken, has to be one of the most difficult reads I’ve ever encountered. To learn about horrific and ongoing sexual exploitation of young children through the eyes of one not old enough to have the vocabulary to describe her ordeals, wrenches something deep inside from its sockets, and gives it a painful twist for good measure. Then to find she is repeatedly and catastrophically let down by the authorities stirs something primitive and dark.
Trouble began for Karen/Shy long before she was even conceived. Her immature birth parents were so badly behaved and out of control that they were both sent away to a special mixed boarding school for maladjusted children in Sussex –- where they met. Theirs was a volatile relationship essentially bonded by their common love of stealing. After a shotgun wedding and just 14 months after her first child (by a different boy) was born and then taken away from her, Jennifer, gave birth to Karen/Shy, in 1963. Their life of crime continued unabated and the baby was frequently left alone in the squalid flat. It was there that her aunt found her: a red-raw and emaciated baby in a rancid cot.
Despite numerous attempts to shore up this dysfunctional and chaotic family, the marriage failed and her future stepfather, Stanley Claridge, came on the scene, 17 years older than Jennifer, the product of a depraved childhood in care, emerging as a drunken, violent and abusive adult. And extremely keen to become a ‘daddy’ to Jennifer’s young girls.
The sexual abuse, not only by Stanley, but also by other men, started when Karen was about three years of age, and her sister Denise a year younger, made the more appalling by extreme physical abuse from both adults. Frequent severe beatings rendered Karen partially deaf and with poor eyesight before she even went to school. But – and this is an incredible aspect of this extraordinary story – somehow Stanley managed to persuade the authorities it was Karen who was the problem; a recurring theme.
Efforts were made to ‘treat’ her so-called promiscuity but she rebelled against the injustices and eventually, at the age of 9, she was sent to stay with Nanny and Grandpa Wallbridge (he was a retired Quaker reverend minister) in order to cure the precocious sexual proclivities Stanley alleged she had. Under their strict but fair rules her true personality emerged, trust blossomed, and at last someone believed in her innocence. It was an idyllic time in her life.
Sadly though, the reprieve was all too short, and after almost a year her mother, though she thoroughly disliked her eldest daughter, managed to manipulate the situation to get Karen back in the family home in order to claim extra benefits. The perverted behaviour began all over again. By the time she was 14 she had suffered three miscarriages and been in intensive care with a venereal disease.
It seems absurd to think that no one would question why an 11-year-old should have an STD, but no one seemed unduly concerned.
Then Stanley somehow contrived to get her sent to a psychiatric ward where she was started on powerful sedative drugs, which in turn then gave him more control of her. He began to arrange for men to come to the house to rape her; he took her to the docks where she was filmed with multiple strangers doing all sorts of sickening things to her, and the pictures sold on the black market. When the situation began to slip out of his control again, he contrived to get her taken back into psychiatric care on a trumped up charge.
There followed a series of spells in assorted care homes, but far from helping her, they were the scenes for further abuse, both physical and sexual. Having been labelled by Social Services as a sexual tease, assumptions were made each time she reported abuse, and she was never believed – not even when Stanley admitted to his crimes in his letters to her. The distraught child repeatedly ran away seeking refuge from the horrific abuse and organisational failures. And one place ended up becoming her true haven: the stream where Grandpa Wallbridge had once taught her to wash away her troubles.
When Shy’s mother became disabled by a stroke, Stanley soon became disillusioned with caring for her and helped her to die. Shy grieved sorely in spite of her mother hating her. all her life. Then her sister Denise turned against her. Bereaved and feeling totally alone, Shy fled to London and, entirely without means or shelter, began a life of crime, sleeping on the streets. Initially she simply stole to survive, but gradually her personal moral code was eroded and she became both ‘greedy’ and ‘arrogant’. Forging signatures bought her untold wealth and for a time she became a social chameleon, hobnobbing with the uber-rich, living a life of luxury. No one knew her real name, age, or history; she had effectively reinvented herself. The high life lasted several months before she was caught, identified as a juvenile, and returned to care.
Throughout her childhood, every time she tried to tell her story, her Social Services report was raked up to turn the blame onto her: she was an attention seeking, sexually promiscuous liar with now a long history of criminal behaviour. Having escaped from a padded cell in a care home, at her lowest ebb yet, with nowhere to go, desperate and alone, she found herself on top of a 15-storey block of flats, ready to end it all. It was a turning point. When she was talked down by a scared young police officer, she mentally said goodbye to the old Karen and consciously turned her face towards a better way of life.
But the authorities hadn’t finished with her yet. She was charged for all her stealing offences in London, remanded in a Liverpool prison, before being sent to Holloway in London. At her trial, she was sentenced to up to two years at a different prison in Essex – a hell all of its own.
In spite of her good intentions, her life was simply a struggle to survive. At the age of 17, in desperation, she married a man she hardly knew, and moved to Germany with him. But after a year she was back in London on her own.
I was like another person, trapped inside the shattered remains of an old human being, trying to make all the broken parts work and survive day to day. I was like a human ghost ship drifting on a wild and treacherous sea, with the hull ripped away and nothing left inside of it.
After a lifetime of being betrayed and abused and let down, it was very hard for her to learn to trust anyone. So, she did what she could to start again: she hid her identity, and began living a law-abiding life, avoiding any contact with the authorities. But the years of being drugged and sexually attacked took their toll; something snapped and she sank into a very deep depression. From absolute rock bottom, she took life one tiny step at a time through her twenties and early thirties gradually finding enjoyment through music and her motorbike, with help from MIND (the mental health charity), all the time protecting her identity fiercely.
As the years passed she eventually, little by little, came out the other side and became a new, happier, grounded person, going on to be a wife, a mother, a songwriter, and a fierce advocate for abused victims.
But there remained the matter of Stanley – now in his 70s and still abusing children, some of them still in nappies. Incredibly, though armed with incontrovertible evidence, when Shy contacted every agency and organisation she could, from care homes through to the House of Lords, no one responded to her plea for something to be done to stop this monster and his gang of paedophiles. So, as a last resort, she sought support from a victim support charity, One in Four, who helped her contact the media. It came at a heavy price. Going public meant she could kiss goodbye to her musical ambitions, but she simply could not abandon those innocent children.
The prestigious BBC programme Newsnight took up the story; so moved were the team that an unprecedented 60-minute special was created. It was the catalyst for finally, finally getting action for the child victims of sexual abuse.
It was not until 2002 that Shy finally had her day in court at the trial of the paedophiles who had made her own childhood so broken and frightening. And it was there that she found that at last she was believed.
With the massive support her case generated and the awards the story attracted, she changed her plans entirely. She put all she had learned towards forging a new career, launching Phoenixsurvivors.com to stop paedophiles and help their victims. She qualified as a private investigator and studied criminal psychology, building a team of dedicated child protection advocates backed up by a support network. Together with Sara Payne, mother of murdered Sarah, she established the first ever centre of excellence in this field and the first ever Phoenix victim support retreat. And she became something of a celebrity.
But sadly her success as the CEO of a flourishing organisation was not the happy ending we might wish for this traumatised woman. Still more tragedy followed. Her 14 year old son took his own life. Then, during the pandemic, she had three bleeds on her brain and had to fight her way back to some level of independence. Just how much horror can one person bear? And yet she can still say:
I am a Phoenix, rising from the ashes of a broken life, an ongoing survival in progress.
Broadmoor
Broadmoor. The very word carried a deeply chilling resonance. The most infamous high security hospital in the world. Makes me think of spine-chilling names like Peter Sutcliffe, Ronnie Kray, Charles Bronson … serial killing, cannibalism, paedophilia, arson, and the like heinous crimes. Or the horrific occasion in 1977, when two inmates trapped a third in a locked area in Broadmoor, and tortured him to death, skinning him alive, ramming a spoon into his brain, before garotting him. What kind of a mind could conceive of, and calculatedly carry out, such barbaric acts? I still remember the shivery sense of profound relief when these men were locked away in this maximum security psychiatric hospital facility for the criminally insane. Little public sympathy for them; widespread fear should they ever be released; a general ‘throw away the key’ mentality! ‘Monsters’, ‘evil incarnate’, ‘irredeemable’. ‘The more whole-life sentences running sequentially the better.’
But TV journalist Jonathan Levi, and cultural historian Emma French, have uncovered a much more nuanced picture of this notorious place. In their book: Inside Broadmoor, (published in 2019 but written before the new hospital was opened in the December of that year) they bring together their observations based on nearly ten years observing and interviewing staff, experts and the patients themselves, and they find that the staff really believe in redemption and rehabilitation – at least in most cases. No matter what they’ve done these men deserve to be treated humanely, and they aim to give them the best chance of a future.
This generosity of spirit from the staff comes in spite of the fact that the threat of violence is ever present. There are on average five physical assaults on staff members each week, but violence is seen as intrinsic to some of the medical conditions these patients suffer from, so it’s viewed more compassionately here than by the public at large.
The authors asked why did the men commit such dastardly deeds? Might they do it again? Can clinicians unravel the mysteries of their brain chemistry and render them safe? Are any conditions untreatable? Is there such a thing as pure evil? What can we do with those who are beyond help? What draws people to this work: 8-900 staff at any given time, all sworn not to reveal any information outside the hospital? If the inmates are themselves the victims of appalling histories, does society owe them anything in compensation?
It’s hard to believe that 200 of Britain’s most dangerous men can be housed here together, maximum unrelenting security measures notwithstanding, some of them day in day out with no reprieve of any kind for decades. Each one suffering from a serious mental disorder rendering every man a grave and immediate risk to the public, not to mention their combined threat.
There is a popular misconception that, when someone goes to Broadmoor, they are there for life; in reality only a very few high-profile criminally insane individuals remain there for decades. Over the years a lot of work has gone into de-stigmatising and altering perception of severe mental illness, with great emphasis on intensive programmes of drug and psychological therapies. The old prison mentality and ethos has largely gone. As a result, nowadays, the average stay for a Broadmoor patient is less than 6 years, and there is a notably lower reoffending rate than in the UK prison population overall. This is not to say the men all go free into the community – depending on their diagnosis and progress they may be sent to a variety of other less high security institutions.
The demographics of today’s patients have changed radically over the last 150 years. Religious and ethnic factors play a significant part in this, and the authors concluded that, It is tragically clear that work needs to be done urgently to address these inequalities.
What really emerges is the vulnerability of these men alongside their criminal insanity.
It is nothing short of chilling that … the fate of many Broadmoor patients was fixed from early childhood. Critically, theirs was a childhood not just of deprivation and economic hardship, but of abuse too … Childhood experiences, often shocking and sickening beyond belief, seal the fate of many patients very early on.
One illustrative case is Dillon, born into a ‘satanic’ family. Father broke his bones, sexually abused him, and raped and beat his mother. From birth, mother rejected Dillon, convinced he was evil. She sexually abused him and tried to kill him repeatedly. He was kept locked up in the attic, not allowed to talk to his brothers, or tethered naked to a post and made to eat food off the floor like a dog. By the age of 5 he was an arsonist. From the age of 7 he went into care but became arsonist, kidnapper, violent offender, out of control alcoholic. What chance did this boy have in life? And yet most of us don’t see beyond the violent, criminally insane adult. The staff in Broadmoor do.
One consequence of receiving effective medication, therapy and healing, is that patients can arrive at a deeply vulnerable moment; they begin to have consciousness of the crime that brought them to the hospital in the first place. This is a point of profound fragility. In some cases it’s more than they can handle and proves lethal; they take their own lives. Suicide is rendered possible in the lower risk areas, especially in Victorian buildings where ligature points, such as bars at the windows, have remained because of a shortage of funding to make the necessary alterations.
Hmm, a shortage of funding … Maintaining these dangerous men in secure units under constant surveillance is horrendously expensive. It costs upwards of £300,000 per annum to keep each patient in Broadmoor – five times the cost of a prison stay. Peter Sutcliffe’s 32 year stay in Broadmoor cost the taxpayer in the region of £10 million. In just one of a number of rooftop protests, Charles Bronson did £250,000 of damage.
I found this book profoundly challenging – challenging my preconceptions, my prejudices, my lack of real understanding: the barbed wire around my own reactions. I commend it to you.
The Last Thing I Remember
Having just been challenged by a return to psychological thrillers (as reported last week), I was in the mood to test my lockdown mettle by a bit more skirting around the edges of insanity. Deborah Bee‘s thriller, The Last Thing I Remember jumped out at me.
The author’s unusual background intrigued me too: fashion editor, magazine writer, creative marketing director. Hmmm.
There are two narrators alternating chapter by chapter:
Sarah is in an ICU with an extremely serious brain trauma, in an induced coma, following a supposed mugging. Since there are no outward signs of her consciousness returning, and she’s unable to open her eyes or move a single muscle, the staff, her family and the police all tend to be indiscreet in her presence. She discovers a number of facts: there is little expectation of recovery; she could be in a persistent vegetative state or locked-in; her husband Adam is dead; her father loves her dearly but her mother is more interested in returning to her suburban life. She’s also painfully aware that she’s being threatened – by a man who smuggles himself into the hospital claiming to be her brother. But she doesn’t have a brother …
Kelly is a bolshie, foul-mouthed teenager, from a seedy London secondary school, Sarah’s next door neighbour, and now a constant visitor at her bedside. Why? Breaking the habit of a lifetime, she reveals more and more of her own story as well as Sarah’s. We see a formidably tough, strong kid who has learned the hard way how to fend for herself in the face of cruelty, injustice and danger, who has her own moral code, her own way of seeking justice. Her friendship with Sarah is an unlikely partnership based on a shared understanding, and a determination to win through against the odds.
As the hours and days pass, Sarah, trapped in her unresponsive body, gradually pieces her own narrative together, coupling overheard conversations with flashes of returning memory. Kelly is dogged in her efforts to bring Sarah back to a sentient life; she has her own reasons for wanting to communicate with her friend and mentor. Together their contrasting voices tell the tale … a tale involving dark issues: bullying, gang crime, domestic violence, paedophilia. And the emerging picture highlights the ripple effect that can, in the end, destroy lives and wreck families; how easy it is for a moral compass to swing away from true north. In the same circumstances, would any of us do better?
I confess I wasn’t a fan of the repeated use of the f-word, or ‘like’, or repetitive phrases, in Kelly’s sections, but I could admire the plotting and development of the characters in this debut novel. It certainly held my attention and offered real distraction. Thank you, Deborah Bee; you were part of this week’s therapy!
Children in trouble
Eh dear, why did I decide to write about pathological parenting? It’s causing me a fair few troubled nights, I can tell you. I’m currently trying to get inside the skin of children … parents … professionals … involved in these disturbing situations. And boy, is it harrowing!i There’s a heavy cloud hanging over me just reading about these traumatic experiences.
With all this in mind I was instantly drawn to three novels by Susan Lewis which I discovered in a charity shop quite by chance on my way to a hospital appointment. I zipped through the first two chapters while I waited to be called.
I’ve always marvelled at the ability of social workers to bear the burden of troubled families where parents may not be the best people to look after their offspring. Deciding when that line is crossed, taking them away … dealing with criticism whichever way they go, threats, physical harm … I’m not made of that kind of courage and stamina, that’s for sure. 
So it was profoundly disturbing to walk alongside overworked and under-appreciated Alex Lake as she lurches from problem family to problem family in No Child of Mine.
Alex is a social worker, passionate about protecting children from those who mean them harm. In No Child of Mine, there’s a veritable A-Z of toxic situations: abandonment, alcoholism, broken relationships, desertion, drug addiction, Fabricated or Induced Illness by Carers, mental illness, murder, paedophilia, physical abuse, sexual violation …! Yoiks! How do social workers ever manage to switch off? How do they preserve professional barriers? If they don’t care, are they in the right job? If they do care, what price do they pay for emotional connection? How do they cope with being principal scapegoats for the press and public? If, on top of that, they carry the additional burden of an horrific history of their own, as Alex does, what then?
Challenging tales to say the least. Taut, sinister, intense. I wanted to wrap Alex herself up in a comfort blanket and smuggle her away to a safe place, never mind the children! Small wonder that Susan Lewis found this one of the hardest stories to tell (… caution there for me!). And we’re left wondering if the fragile solution at the end can possibly hold. Which is why the author chose to continue the story in a sequel: Don’t Let Me Go. 
Since both books are a door-stopping 580+ pages long, I guess it’s lucky for us she split the story into two parts!
By now Alex has reinvented herself as Charlotte Nicholls and moved to the other side of the world. Life in New Zealand in a new family helps to heal deep wounds, but then suddenly, dramatically, her entire world is blown apart. Do pure motives ever excuse illegal actions? Should a vulnerable child become a victim all over again just to ensure the paperwork is all shipshape? What price is too high in the search for justice? I was on tenterhooks to find out the fate of a terrified and traumatised four-year-old. How would she react to being ripped from the heart of a family who loved her so deeply? And handed to a series of strangers, strangers who held none of the keys to the doors that protected her from her own private hell? And how would the law deal with a professional who had knowingly flouted its diktats? I’m relieved that we got to hear how the situation was resolved, although it’s sobering to realise that neither Chloe/Ottilie nor Charlotte/Alex can ever erase the traumas of their early lives.
I might well quibble about some dubious elements of this story – there are issues with time frames and professional boundaries – but such is the compelling nature of the storyline that I found myself well able to suspend disbelief in order to focus on the underlying messages. And as a result I have even more respect for the brave souls who spend their lives working for the good of these vulnerable children, too often unseen and unsung – like our emergency services dealing with this terrible spate of atrocities and tragedies. And for authors like Susan Lewis who help us to understand in our hearts as well as our brains.
NB. The third book, Stolen, didn’t resonate in the same way and I found the story line too far fetched to be plausible. But since the subject matter is less relevant to my own character development or research, nothing lost there.