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Actors Brian Syron Brian Syron (19 November 1934 – 14 October 1993) was a human rights advocate, teacher, actor, writer, stage director and Australia's first Indigenous feature film director who has been recognised as the first First Nations feature film director. Brian Syron was born in Balmain, Sydney to Daniel Syron, a Biripi (also known as Birpai) man from New South Wales and Elizabeth Murray from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England. During his childhood, Brian learned about his Aboriginal heritage by living with his paternal grandmother at Karuah, 184 km north of Sydney, for long chuncks of time. When he was fourteen, Brian ended up in the Grafton Correctional Centre. By the age of twenty-two, Brian had become a male model and began studying acting at the Ensemble Theatre Company in Sydney. Brian later co-founded a theatre company in Saratogo Springs in New York and did a number of tours throughout the country, including through the southern states where segregation prompted him to direct his attention to Aboriginal issues in Australia. Back in Australia, Brian Styron taught Aboriginal actors, including Denis Walker, Gary Foley, Jack Davis, Maureen Watson and Hyllus Maris. External Website

Academic Articles The American West and the Archetypel Orpan Louie Attebery ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Two Report Zoe Baker ➝ From Us to Us: A collection of advice from care-experienced graduates to care-experienced graduates Zoe Baker ➝ "One of Us": Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography Jack Bowers ➝ 45 Care Leaver Friendly Ways Care Leavers Association ➝ Popular perceptions of disrupted childhoods Kirsty Capes ➝ Interrogating ‘poor outcomes’ and disrupted care in children’s fiction Kirsty Capes ➝ ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’, Delyth Edwards & Rosie Canning ➝ Reconsidering the care-crime connection in a climate of crisis Claire Fitzpatrick ➝ Living with the past: the creation of the stolen generation positionality Stephanie Gilbert ➝ A childhood on paper Managing access to child care files by post-care adults Jim Goddard ➝ What "The Mandalorian" Teaches Us About Foster Care Sophia Alexandra Hall ➝ Louis Armstrong’s “Karnofsky Document”: The Reaffirmation of Social Death and the Afterlife of Emotional Labor Dalton Jones ➝ A New Stolen Generation? Michael Lavarch ➝ Fremantle: Reflections of a child migrant Michael McCarthy ➝ Two Mothers - Twice the blessing or was I cursed? Deidre Michell ➝ What Makes a Family? The Radical Portrayal of Diverse Families in Australian Picture Books Sarah Mokrzycki ➝ Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian Literature Irena Avsenik Nabergoj ➝ The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret Garden Jerry Phillips ➝ "Let's Go to the Movies": Filmic Representations of Gay Foster and Adoptive Parents Damien Riggs ➝ The Role of Orphan Films in the 21st Century Archive Dan Streible ➝ Oliver Twisted: the origins of Lord Voldemort in the Dickensian orphan. James Washick ➝ Incarnations of the Orphan Nina Auerbach ➝ Facing the cliff-edge: care-experienced graduates’ access to and progression through taught postgraduate study in the United Kingdom Zoe Baker ➝ Revealing the Profile of Foster Parents, Biological Parents, Foster Children and the Triadic Relationship amongst them Vasiliki Baltsioti & Ignatia Farmakopoulou ➝ Social Workers’ Involvement in Policy Practice in Portugal Francisco Branco ➝ It’s My Journey: It’s My Life! Care leavers and access to social care files Care Leaver Association ➝ (Pseudo)motherhood, care constructs and the geography of the nuclear family: class, gender and the suburbs in contemporary fiction Kirsty Capes ➝ Winnie Woodfern Comes Out in Print: Story-Paper Authorship and Protolesbian Self-Representation in Antebellum America Daniel Cohen ➝ Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories Craig Evans ➝ Confronting intergenerational harm: Care experience, motherhood and criminal justice involvement Claire Fitzpatrick et al ➝ Reflexivity and Lived Experience of Out-of-Home Care: Positionality as an Early Parenthood Researcher Amy Gill ➝ Fostered Voices: Narratives of US Foster Care Nikky Greer ➝ A perspective from the periphery: Re-imagining regional North Queensland women's stories using historical fiction Louise Henry ➝ From Folktales to Fiction: Orphan Characters in Children’s Literature Melanie A. Kimball ➝ Contemplating Fictional and Nonfictional Orphan Stories (2004) Dennis Leoutsakas ➝ From Hagiography to Personal Pain: Stories of Australian foster care from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century Dee Michell ➝ Exploring the legal representation of individuals in foster care: What say youth and alumni? J Jay Miller et al. ➝ Surviving the "House of a Hundred Windows": Irish Industrial Schools in Recent Fiction and Memoirs Michael Molino ➝ The politics of good intentions and what I’ve learned from Romania’s ‘orphans’ Mariela Neagu ➝ A Fragment of the Maltese Exodus: Child Migration to Australia 1953-1965 David Plowman ➝ Pumps and poetry Melanie Senior ➝ ‘Yes I’ve got some historic convictions but do the public really need protecting from me?’ The Record ➝ Lost Boys and Recovered Classics: Literary and Social Memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers (1995) Christopher Wilson ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase one report Zoe Baker ➝ The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Three Report Zoe Baker ➝ Review: Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels. Wade Bell ➝ Oliver Twist, textbook of child abuse Patricia Brennan ➝ The Perceived Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Care-Experienced People Rosie Canning et al ➝ Care leavers in the ivory tower Kirsty Capes ➝ Rewriting the Past: Gerard Mannix Flynn's Nothing to Say and James X Victoria Connor ➝ No More Standing In The Shadows – Treating The Wounds Of Historic Forced Adoption Jeannot Farmer ➝ Foster Focus Mag Foster Focus Mag ➝ More Than Our Childhoods: A survivor-led participatory approach to out-of-home care life story research Amy Gill & Dee Michell ➝ As a former foster kid, I'm giving Tracy Beaker a second chance Sophia Alexandra Hall ➝ The Adultification of Black Girls in State Care: Perspectives Sylvia Ikomi ➝ Healthy Depictions? Depicting Adoption and Adoption News Events on Broadcast News Kline, Susan L.; Chatterjee, Karishma; Karel, Amanda I. ➝ Conceptualizing Stigma Bruce G Link et al. ➝ Blood Doesn't Define Evotypical Families: Eleanor Spence's Stories of Informal and Formal Foster Care in Australia Dee Michell ➝ Out of sight: the censoring of family diversity in picture books Sarah Mokrycki ➝ Marking motherhood: Tattooing and willfulness as a response to and a way to survive child removal Lisa Morriss and Siobhan Beckwith ➝ Otherways' into the Garden: Re-Visioning the Feminine in The Secret Garden Linda Parsons ➝ Children out of place' : representations of foster care in the Australian news media Damien King Riggs ➝ Christian Science Versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden Anne Stiles ➝ Integrating personal and professional experiences: Seven phases to integrating loss and grief. Rosemary Wanganeen ➝ A scoping review of the transition experiences and outcomes of young women leaving residential out-of-home care Yujie Zhao, Jacinta Waugh & Philip Mendes ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver 2023 Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and won the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield.[While Kingsolver's novel is similarly about a boy born into poverty, Demon Copperhead is set in Appalachia and explores contemporary issues.[3][4][5] The protagonist and narrator is born Damon Fields to a teenage mother in a trailer home. He is raised in Lee County, located in Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and nicknamed "Demon Copperhead" for the color of his hair and his attitude. As Demon grows up, he must use his charms and wits to survive poverty in the contemporary American South. External Website

Terry Galloway is a UK social justice campaigner with lived experience of the care system. He spent much of his childhood moving through the care system, living in over 100 placements, and facing trauma, instability, and discrimination. His sister Hazel, who also grew up in care, faced significant challenges and was killed by her partner — a personal loss that deepened Terry’s commitment to systemic change. After leaving care, Terry worked in a range of jobs before dedicating himself to advocacy. To support his campaigning work, he set up his own business and later a not-for-profit providing supported accommodation for care leavers. Norman Galloway Homes is a not-for-profit organisation providing supported accommodation and person-centred jobs programmes for care leavers aged 16–25 to help them build relationships, develop essential life skills and transition into independent living. He also co-founded the Care Leaver Offer comparison website, and serves as a trustee of NYAS (National Youth Advocacy Service). Terry leads a national campaign to have care experience recognised as a protected characteristic  under law, aiming to reduce discrimination and ensure policy makers account for the needs of care-experienced individuals. The campaign aligns with recommendations from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (IRCSC) , which endorsed making care experience a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. With national legislative change not yet achieved, the campaign has successfully persuaded over 120 local councils to adopt motions to treat care experience “as if it were a protected characteristic”  in their own policy framework. These motions typically commit councils to: consider care experience in equality impact assessments; involve care-experienced people in policy development; extend corporate parenting principles; and encourage wider bodies to adopt similar commitments. Together, Terry Galloway’s lived experience, service delivery, and policy advocacy have driven tangible change in how care-experienced people are recognised and supported across the UK.

Chris Wild is a UK-based activist, author, speaker, care system consultant, national advisor, and charity supporter advocating for children and young people impacted by the care system. Drawing on his own lived experience of growing up in care after the death of his father, Chris speaks publicly about systemic failures, trauma, and the long-term barriers faced by care-experienced individuals. His work includes public speaking, media engagement, policy advising, and partnerships with organisations focused on trauma-informed support, equity, and youth empowerment. Chris returned to the care system as a care worker, hoping to make a difference. Instead, he found a system largely unchanged, still failing the very children it was meant to protect. In Damaged , Chris shares his own harrowing experiences alongside the stories of the boys, girls, men and women he met along the way, exposing a broken system and demanding urgent action to protect Britain’s forgotten children. The State of It: Stories from the Frontline of a Broken Care System   extends this analysis to the wider impacts of systemic failures and offers insights on what must change. Through his writing, Chris amplifies the voices of those often unheard and frames care reform as a social justice imperative. In addition to his writing and advocacy, Chris works with other campaigners such as Terry Galloway on efforts to have  care experience  legally recognised as a  protected characteristic  under the UK’s Equality Act 2010. This campaign seeks to ensure that discrimination linked to care background is treated with the same legal seriousness as other protected characteristics, and has seen growing support from local authorities and civil society groups across the UK. Parliamentary debates have acknowledged the joint work of activists including Chris and Terry on this issue, which aims to embed care experience more firmly into equality policy and decision-making processes.

By Paris Bartholomew Peeling off my polo neck, I heard a sharp intake of breath from my  school  nurse and saw her eyes widen as she scanned my body. I was six years old and my skin looked like a battleground: burns on my arm where it had been held over a flame, blue-black bruises from where I’d been hit with a belt, scars all over my scalp & a feeling of terror that followed me like a cloud. The school nurse was accompanied by the lovely lady from the NSPCC, who gave me my first ever toy, a small black and white dog called Snoopy. I spent two weeks in the local hospital. The assessment and x-rays - which seemed relentless - had a two-fold purpose: to ensure I was not suffering from any internal damage & to piece together the awful experiences I had endured. The evidence of previously broken bones was what caused my mother to be arrested on suspicion of child abuse. After hospital, I was placed in an assessment centre, a large, brick building, devoid of windows, with high barbed-wire fencing all around the perimeter. There were 4 sections, an education facility on the premises, and residential staff who worked various shifts. I resided in section A, and section B, C and D housed the children who had behavioural and learning difficulties. Back then, the terminology was very different and full of negativity and offence. I recall my first night. With the light off and the glow of light under my door as a guide, I got up to use the toilet and realised my bedroom door was locked. I crawled back into bed tired, confused and sad. That night was the first time I had wet my bed in many years. Mum was convicted of multiple counts of abuse, neglect and what was termed ‘failure to thrive’, meaning she had consciously did what she could to prevent me growing and developing in a healthy and happy way. She was sentenced to four years in prison. Her ‘two-year reign of terror’ was splashed over the newspapers. However, I was astute enough to know that this was not something that had started two years ago. She served eighteen months in an all-female prison in North London called Holloway, spending most of her time in isolation to protect her from the abuse she would endure if her fellow inmates knew why she was there. I think about that protection she had while incarcerated, and the lack of protection I had from her as a child and, on reflection, it seems somewhat ironic. Even now I feel a sense of anguish at what I endured at the hands of my Mum. At Christmas, everyone went ‘home’ to their respective families, at which point it slowly dawned on me that my life was different, that I was different, in many ways. The staff expressed concern, as I was the youngest child and the only child who remained for the duration of the holidays. I ate lovely Christmas food for the first time, and I received my first life-size doll, who I named Kathy. A white member of staff, (I nicknamed him My Fox in my mind, as his hair was the colour of fox’s fur), had tried to wash my afro hair. He used a bar of soap, and I recall the pain as my hair matted into a clump and he tried to comb it. I began crying, and he said it was best if they cut my hair off. When the other children came back after Christmas, they decided I was no longer a girl & I was teased relentlessly. My short hair had turned me into a boy overnight, and for the second time in a short period, I realised I was different from the other children. When my dad came to visit me, he was sad and angry that my hair was gone, he wanted to know who had cut it & why they had done so. Once I left Luton House, I was placed in my first children’s home. This was a large, country-style house in Essex which housed around 22 children from ages 2 to about 17 years of age. I enjoyed having other children my own age to play with, and I felt safe - for the first time in my life, I actually felt safe. But I also felt anguish, as I thought about my mother, the prison and what that was like for her. I didn’t blame myself, but I didn’t want her to be locked up. In my eight-year-old brain, prison was a scary, dark, horrible place where people were treated badly and given very little to eat and drink. I envisaged her eating bread with no butter and drinking only water. One of the children had found out my Mum was in prison and had given me a picture of what prison was like. I never questioned his idea as he was bigger than me and older, so he knew what he was talking about, surely. It was at this point in my journey that I began to look at food differently, a sense of loyalty to Mum and a strange desperate feeling of being out of control, made me limit my food intake. I no longer enjoyed the strange, unfamiliar food I was given, and apart from the sweets I spent my pocket money on, I rarely ate. My keyworker at the children’s home informed me that an advert was being placed in the local paper for a new home for me. Initially, I felt excited and terrified. They asked me what I would like to be called, as they would change my real name to protect me, especially as my name was so uncommon.  Kathy, my favourite doll, that would be my name in the paper. There was a response to the advert, but it was hard to find black families with enough room to take in a child. But I was delighted when I met the Hendon* family. They had five children, one only 2 years old, so cute, although he was never keen on playing with me as he loved his cars and trains.  Julie* was the same age as me, and the only girl in the family. It was time for me to leave primary school, so we would attend school together, I was only a few months older, but I was in the academic year above her. We played together lots, but she was larger and stronger than me, and it wasn’t long before I was bullied into doing things I did not want to do, like shop lifting. It began with sweets and crisps, but soon led to bigger and more expensive items, and if I didn’t do it, she would hurt me. One day, I came into my bedroom to find the light off. It was bedtime, so I attempted to turn on the light switch to get ready for bed, only to be confronted with the bulb removed. Julie proceeded to jump onto my back, attacking me with a sharp object, which I later found out was my foster mum’s knitting needles. I tried helplessly to defend myself, but the muffled laughter in the background, as my foster brothers hid in the dark to watch the onslaught, gave me a dejected feeling of resignation. It was pointless. Julie reminded me that I was not welcome in her family. Kathy, my lovely life-size doll, had been damaged; Julie had cut off all her hair.  It wasn’t long before I asked to leave the family. I was unlucky! Four more families, with short stays in between in group homes, residential homes and a girl’s hostel, left me feeling displaced, unloved, and unwanted. For the next nine years in care, I bounced from place to place, never fitting in. Every family was different, culturally, racially, religiously and I found it increasingly difficult to stay positive and focussed, at school I began acting out. Racism from white staff members left me confused and alienated, I was called ‘a Bounty’ by the older black children, accused of being ‘brown on the outside’ but ‘acting too white’. I was criticised for not conforming with a family’s religion, and I was beginning to form an outer shell of anger and protection to protect myself from being attacked. I began isolating myself and reading books about twins who only communicated with each other, books about women, psychology, books which inspired me and gave me hope. Bell Hooks, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelo made a fierce and noticeable impression on me. They made me feel determined. I wanted to succeed, and I felt as if I could. I went to a conference led by an organisation called ‘Black and In Care’. It was the first time I was in a room filled with positive people who were all in foster care, children’s homes and other residential units. We spoke abut our experiences in smaller groups with people from Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester, all mixed-race or black young people who were care-experienced, and most of the adults, the professionals, were people of colour too. For the first time in my life, I felt heard, seen, valued even. When Mum came out of prison, she sporadically visited me, but I noticed that these visits were less frequent if I lived in a family. She was odd, and I observed how untidy her home was in comparison to other places I had lived. When I confronted her about the abuse, she laughed at me and said I had been ‘brainwashed’ by Social Services. She said she was imprisoned because society was racist. I knew otherwise, and nothing she could say would change what I felt: I had never done anything wrong, not really, and I had never had any of my basic needs for love and protection met, while in her care. But what had hurt me the most emotionally, was the fact that these needs were not met while I was in care either. It might seem strange that I was able to forgive the woman who had ruined my life but deep down I knew it would help me heal. From the books I read about psychology, the way she spoke, the hoarding in her home and her general demeanour, I could tell she was mentally unwell.   I began to attend some group sessions organised by Black and In Care, the organisation which had held the conference, and I became a member of the Steering Group, then the Chair, leading the London arm of the organisation. I began sharing my perspectives with policymakers of what it had been like to live in care as a black child. This led to changes in the law - the 1989 Children’s Act. Foster carers were to be trained in understanding trauma and child development, and children from black and ethnic minority backgrounds were now being placed with foster carers from the same or similar cultural backgrounds. I felt so empowered. Mum had told me I would amount to nothing, and her words had penetrated deep. But she was wrong. Here I was, making life better for every young black person growing up in care. I knew I wanted to practice psychology, I wanted to help Mum and to use empathy and compassion to understand her and her struggles. I got a grant to do a degree in teaching, social work and youth work at Canterbury Christchurch University and as the years passed, I was drawn to jobs that helped people.  I volunteered for local charities, and I became a foster carer, fostering a little girl in 2014, helping me piece my heart back together. Jane* was unable to speak when she came to me, but with encouragement she started talking through singing & sign language. I gave her the love I had so desperately craved. I channelled my experience into a force for good, travelling the length of the UK as a motivational speaker, sharing my story and my expertise in psychology to inspire and motivate children in schools and professionals in business. And I continue to campaign for support for children in care. I’m currently an associate trainer for the Fostering Network, the UK’s largest foster care organisation, and I am a panel member for a private fostering agency, regularly reading reports and assessing prospective foster carers. I’m a motivational speaker, travelling the length and breadth of the UK to speak to children in schools, inmates in prisons, professionals in social work and teaching, therapeutic practitioners and as a keynote speaker at conferences and seminars to inspire change.   The number of children in care is set to rise to 100,000 by 2025. There is a shortage of foster carers in England and this needs to be addressed but much more is required across the care system, including more support when people transition out of care at the age of 21, more focus on helping LGBTQ+ children and, in my opinion, being in care should be a protected characteristic. Care leavers should be given a head start in life.  I feel passionate about awareness raising, research, and working with other organisations to develop positive interventions.   Long-term outcomes for care experienced people are shocking, with research across 16 countries showing a higher risk of social exclusion and marginalisation for former fostered young people ( Annick, 2011 ). Recent figures from England ( Department for Education, 2019 ) show 38% of those who leave care aged 19 to 21 are not in education, training or employment (NEET), compared with 11.6% for all young people. Another study reviewed the prevalence of mental health disorders among looked after children in the UK and found that around 1 in 3 had a diagnosed mental health condition with figures currently standing at 1 in 4 for the general population. Government statistics suggest that around 28% of adult prisoners are care experienced and one in four homeless people are previous care leavers or care experienced.   To anyone in care is reading this, I want to say:   “Believe in yourself. Don’t believe the rhetoric that you won’t achieve anything – I am proof that isn’t true. Get support and remember that being in care means you will be resilient and understand people better than anyone. Being in care is your superpower – remember that.”   Find out more about Paris here . Follow Paris on Twitter: @survivegrow