Missing. Our story – child criminal exploitation

Where do I start to tell our story? I think it’s fair to say that despite the ups, downs and heart aches, we’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Our son came to live with us as a toddler. He was very shy and withdrawn having had a difficult start in life. He and his siblings were removed from their birth family due to abuse and neglect and we slowly helped him come to terms with this to become a strong family unit. There were ups and downs- settling him into school, him making friends and separating from us when he was at school was always quite tricky. Even at home he liked to know where we were. We had lots of adventures. Life began when we met him – it was love at first on our part anyway!! Every boy needs a dog so our son became the owner of a rescue dog who adored him. After some years his younger sibling came to live with us and he was a proud big brother though he drew the line at nappy changing!

High school was a bit tricky and when lockdown came our son was more than happy being at home. We had special times then he and I. On returning to school our son fell in with children with lots of issues and started truanting with them. The more school he missed, the less he wanted to go because he was falling behind and struggling to keep up. He soon met other boys outside of school who also didn’t attend and began shoplifting and other activities around our town, getting in trouble with the police.

He began to go missing, once for 6 days which was the longest 6 days of my life. Little did I know what was coming and that the situation was going to get a lot worse. I feel that the people he was associating with used his vulnerabilities and often left him to hold all the blame. Even after being viciously assaulted by these people and receiving death threats, he would always defend them, saying they were his bros, because of the grooming process. Our son started having girlfriends and at times this would settle him down and he’d attend education, but I feel that the education system really let him down. Rather than recognising and responding to his needs and vulnerabilities, the school labelled him as a naughty boy. This led to a permanent exclusion. It seems unbelievable that an adopted child with an EHCP in place could be excluded but the school assured me that this would give my son greater support from a better educational provision. This didn’t happen. They were just passing the buck, so he and I were left with no education or support. I really had to fight, trying to get my son into the college that interested him. After many meetings and the support of our local MP, we secured a place. At first, he did great and was a poster boy for the college, but during the Christmas holidays he was drawn back to the old crowd. We were convinced he was being coerced, but this is difficult to prove to safeguarding professionals. He was introduced to drugs by the group who’d targeted him and started to use drugs.

He stopped attending education and started going missing again and we were calling the police regularly. He was placed on a child protection plan and allocated a social worker, which he didn’t like. He was so caught up in the exploitation that he couldn’t hear us and it became really difficult to communicate; he was pushing against all our boundaries. If we tried to protect or safeguard him, he’d become physically violent towards us, especially my husband, who’d just take the blows. It was so tough managing this and social care’s advice was to just let him do what he was doing to prevent the escalation of his violence in the home.

We felt our son slipping from us; he spent more and more time out and when was home he closed off and barricaded himself in his bedroom. The involvement of police and court bail was not enough to keep him in. There were curfew checks anytime between 12am-6am. It was really intrusive. By this time our son had been accused of committing a number of serious crimes and the police were gathering evidence, including seizing his phones. Yet he would have another phone. He started to steal things from our home and we had to have locks put on bedroom doors. He had access to drugs and we wondered what he had to do, what was the cost to him, of this. He was becoming very distressed and aggressive in the home. Our life had changed so much, but we loved our son and were just holding on, though it felt like his bond to us was diminishing rapidly and we were losing all connection to him.

Then our son asked me if I could take him to meet an old friend and I felt as if maybe things could turn around, though a lot of the information he gave didn’t seem to add up. After that he really started to close off and I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the start of our lives changing forever. Shortly after our internet connection was out and our son blamed his dad and viciously attacked him, wounding his head. I just heard my husband screaming in pain and called 999. During this time my son fled, but returned and broke into the house and stole important items. My husband saw my son with some males he was associating with and tried to retrieve the items he’d stolen which led to an altercation, with our son and another male attacking my husband and another male filming it. My husband had reached breaking point. I felt like social services had to give us better support now, but that didn’t happen. Our son never returned. He went to live with an adult from his birth family who were involved in drug dealing.

Despite everything, I wanted our son home with us. Social services, however, had other ideas and rang round our friends and family to take our son, who all said no, then placed him in a children’s home that he ran away from. He returned to a member of his birth family where there were massive risks to his safety. Although he was under 16 years, social services said he could vote with his feet. I thought this would be for a week or so, until things calmed down, but social care decided that despite all the risks posed to him at his birth family’s and the existing risks associated with him being criminally exploited that they would support this. His birth family member encouraged him to cut links with all of our family and any of his older friends and I heard through a mutual friend that his phone was checked by the birth family member to ensure he had no contact with us. I feel like this is grooming and controlling behaviour, but there was little I could do without support from agencies.

Despite raising our concerns, social care closed the case, saying that there were no longer any risks to our son. I attended the last meeting and my son voiced such a lot of anger towards me. It was obvious my son was in a lot of pain, but all those present didn’t really have the skills to support us through it. This didn’t sit right with us that suddenly our son was seen as being ‘settled with his birth family’ when there were so many risks and ongoing exploitation. Friends and family said things like, ‘well you can move on now. Or you can focus on your daughter.’ People don’t seem to get that you have been a parent to your child and love him and the loss is heart-breaking. As parents we felt treated like criminals and there was a total lack of understanding about our attachment to our child.

Grief washed over me, this was unresolved loss, a feeling I’d never known before. Relentless missing him, little reminders everywhere, certain songs on the radio bringing memories, but no closure. Every time my phone pings, the glimmer of hope it’s him.

I hope one day he comes back. I will always hope so and will welcome him with open arms, however he presents. Will he? Who knows? I have always thought of him as my son, I couldn’t love him more if I’d given birth to him. But, I’ve been made to feel that he was just on loan and it breaks me. We always said we loved each other, no matter what and that’s still true. Although you adjust to new situations, I will never adjust to not having my son in my life and I will never be the same person I was before I met him; a part of me will always be missing.