Biography of Care Experienced People The Altar Boys Suzanne Smith The Altar Boys explores the live and deaths of 3 victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the now notorious Maitland-Newcastle diocese in New South Wales. One of the victims became a priest who reported child sexual abuse to the NSW police; he was then banished from the diocese, ending up homeless and in poor health. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Sunken Road Garry Disher 1996 The Sunken Road is set in the mid-north of South Australia. It's the story of Anna and her family and friends - one of whom is Chester Flood. Chester's family is a large impoverished Catholic one, reason enough for the community to disparage them. The siblings are dispersed when their parents die; Chester ends up in the local convent which was previously a reformatory. As an adult, he does a stint in prison for the white-collar crime of fraud. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance John Boswell 1991 This text looks at the abandonment of children in Western Europe in both antiquity and the Middle Ages. The book illuminates a vast area of social history and aims to enlighten us on attitudes to childhood, the nature of the family, property and the nature of birth control. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles A Bengali Pope in Merrie England The Telegraph online 2026 Peter Pope (c. 1600) is thought to be the 1st person from South Asia to arrive in England. Patrick Copland, a chaplain in the East India Company, had been in India for 2 years. He returned to England in 1614 with a young Bengali boy he had been teaching to speak, read & write in English. Patrick Copland’s ward caused a stir in London with children following him down the streets. In 1616, Coplan requested & received permission for the boy to be publicly baptised. The baptism was performed on 22 December 1616 in front of a sizeable crowd at the Church of St Denis on Fenchurch St. Thus, the boy from Bengal became Petrus Papa or Peter Pope, a name chosen apparently by King James 1 & by whom he was baptised. (King James 1 of England & King James VI of Scotland had himself grown up without parents). Peter Pope became an interpreter & translator & is credited with having published a Patrick Copland sermon, “Virginia’s God be thanked” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Insidious Intent Val McDermid 2017 Number one bestseller Val McDermid returns with a pulse-pounding, suspenseful novel featuring two of the most distinctive and iconic characters in crime fiction: Tony Hill and Carol Jordan. The story features a 14 year old boy who is living in foster care after the murder of his mother. External Website

Authors A Wards of the state: An autobiographical novella ➝ Letters to Gil ➝ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ➝ Would It Surprise You To Know…? ➝ All at Sea: Memories of a Coram Boy ➝ Deliver Me From Evil ➝ Inside Out: An Autobiography ➝ Thrown Away Child ➝ Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union ➝ Dirty Laundry ➝ Awatere: A Soldier’s Story ➝ Let Me Tell You. Mending a Broken Childhood ➝ Ushant: an autobiographical narrative ➝ A Place to Call Home ➝ Labeled: Ward of the State ➝ Fifty-One Moves. ➝ Against All Odds ➝ Back to Top

Radio & Podcast Charlie Chaplin Dan Snow's History Hit 2023 With Dan Snow to discuss Chaplin’s long life in all its complications (is Paul Duncan, author of the Charlie Chaplin Archives. As the men say, in many ways Chaplin’s The Tramp was autobiographical, a reflection of Chaplin’s poverty stricken childhood. However, as a successful man in Hollywood, Chaplin had disturbing relationships with girls who starred in his films and was eventually exiled from the USA on instruction by J. Edgar Hoover. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Children of Ever After Avery Yearwood 2024 In West Philadelphia, Brittney, a struggling single mother, loses custody of her children, who are placed with Rebecca, a childless professor. As the two women face off in a flawed foster care system, they unexpectedly find connection, compassion, and a new definition of family. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Sunlight Pilgrims Jenni Fagan 2017 The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in a caravan park in the north of Scotland. Here. a group of people who live on the margins are waiting out an extreme winter. One character, Stella, is a transgender teenager who is terrified at the relentless march of puberty and who we see struggling to gain acceptance. External Website

Television Shows My Life with the Walter Boys 2023 My Life with the Walter Boys is an American coming-of-age drama series, based on the 2014 eponymous novel by Ali Novak. Recently orphaned Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodrigeuz) is a 15-year-old from Manhattan who is relocated to rural Colorado and the Walters family after the death of her parents. Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty) is a veterinarian and was Jackie’s mother’s best friend from Columbia University. During the series it is also revealed that she was adopted as a child. The Walters is a large family with 7 sons and one daughter. They also have the 2 Garcia boys living with them, cousins of the Walter children. The first season of My Life with the Walter Boys concludes with Jackie deciding to return to New York where she will live with an uncle. External Website

Radio & Podcast Bluebells on Bunny Hill Alan And Irene Brogan 2023 When Alan and Irene met in 1959, their connection was instant. Two isolated children, just seven and nine, found warmth and kindness in each other in a children’s home that was unwelcoming and strict. They would steal moments together up on Bunny Hill and talk about their lives. But the home had a rule that boys and girls could not mix. So, when their friendship was discovered, Alan and Irene were separated. On BBC Radio 4’s Life Changing, they explain how it would take four decades for them to find each other again. External Website

Authors U United States of Tara ➝ Unfamiliar ➝ Unorthodox ➝ Under the Bridge ➝ Unsettled ➝ Under a Dark Sun ➝ Unbelievable ➝ Upper Middle Bogan ➝ Unforgiven ➝ Untamed ➝ Until I Kill You ➝ Unforgotten ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Bodkin 2024 Bodkin (2024) is an Irish black comedy thriller series. An American podcaster (Will Forte) travels to Bodkin, a small Irish town, to explore a cold case – 3 people disappeared 25 years ago. Joining him is London-based but Irish-born Dove Maloney (Siobhan Cullen), an investigative journalist who – at the age of 12 – was left by her mother in a convent and raised by nuns. An adoptee also features in the story; he is convinced he was adopted from Romania. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir This Boy. A Memoir of a Childhood Alan Johnson 2013 Alan Johnson's 2013 memoir, This Boy, was the 2014 Winner of the Orwell Prize and 2014 Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. As many have pointed out, Alan's mother Lily and his sister Linda are the heroes of the story. Lily works multiple jobs to keep her family together, even though her health requires her to be in and out of hospital. Linda ensures that, at the age of 16, the state entrusts 13 year old Alan's care to her after Lily dies. Alan Johnson - after a variety of jobs - became the MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance Cyntham Banham 2026 Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance (2026) by Australian writer, journalist & lawyer Cynthia Banham is in part the story of Banham finding out that her great-grandmother was not orphaned but abandoned at birth by an unnamed mother. Initially appalled at the discovery a mother could abandon her baby, and wanting to find out more about her great-grandmother, Banham & her family visit Bologna in Italy where she discovers that during the 19th century, babies were often abandoned to avoid shame. Cynthia Banham subsequently reflects on whether her initial harsh judgement of her great-great-grandmother was connected to her own mothering which is ‘different’ because she lost her legs in the 2007 Garuda Flight 200 Crash which killed 21 people. External Website

Academic Articles The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Two Report Zoe Baker 2024 The report presents the key findings from the second phase of the Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations project. It also presents a series of recommendations for policy and practice which intend to better support care-experienced graduates' transitions out of higher education and into employment and/or further study. External Website

Films/Videos States of Fear 1999 States of Fear (1999) is a documentary series produced by Irish journalist and filmmaker Mary Raftery (1957-2012). States of Fear was broadcast on RTE and detailed the abuse children suffered (between the 1930s and 1970s) in reformatory and industrial schools. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was subsequently established in 2000, and the Ryan Report was delivered in May 2009. Fintan O’Toole writes (We Don’t Know Ourselves, p. 519): “What Mary Raftery set out to do in 1998 was to tell the whole story of a system that incorporated fifty-two institutions and incarcerated something close to 50,000 children. She understood that the only way to do this was to listen in depth to hundreds of survivors. She and her researcher Sheila Ahern did what no official body had ever done in the history of the state, which was to treat the evidence of those who had been locked up and abused under its watch as valid.” External Website

Writers Maxim Gorky 1868-1936 Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868 – 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was in kinship care, brought up by his grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs. Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. External Website

Academic Articles Louis Armstrong’s “Karnofsky Document”: The Reaffirmation of Social Death and the Afterlife of Emotional Labor Dalton Jones 2015 This essay examines a controversial memoir Louis Armstrong wrote on his deathbed in New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. I argue that critics have made the mistake of treating each of the narrative’s elements as discrete units. In doing so they have protected the musician’s legacy by detouring around many of the challenges the document poses to some deeply cherished ideas about Armstrong’s life and the significance of his art. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles UK Government's 2010 Apology to Former Child Migrants Child Migrants Trust 2010 "In 2010, at a poignant and historic event, the UK Government formally apologised to thousands of former child migrants who were sent to distant parts of the Commonwealth. The apology, delivered on February 24, 2010, by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, marked a significant acknowledgment of the suffering experienced by approximately 130,000 children who were forcibly shipped away from Britain, most recently to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia, from the 1870s until 1970." External Website