sexual exploitation

The darkest side of life

17 July 2025 , 0

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.

Broken, care homes, child abuse, life of crime, maladjusted children, MIND, Newsnight, One in Four, paedophilia, Phoenix support groups, precocious sexual proclivities, Quakers, Sara Payne, Sarah Payne, sexual exploitation, Shy Keenan, suicide, victim support, victim support retreats

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