KENNY Murray, public affairs co-ordinator of Who Cares Scotland, was just 11 when he first went into care with his two brothers – aged seven and 10 – and his five and six-year-old sisters. Now 27, he is horrified that his own traumatic experience of sibling separation continues for children and young people in the care system even today.
“When we went into care it was an emergency placement and we were all together,” he says. “Then gradually we were dispatched to different areas. It wasn’t explained to me, it just happened. First my sisters went to one place, then my two brothers. It was very difficult.”
Left by himself he was then taken to a children’s home in the back of a police car, where he remembers high security gates topped with barbed wire and posters “protesting” about that the care unit was there at all.
“I was shown to a bedroom in the unit. The window didn’t open and there was nothing there – it was just a room with a bed. I didn’t have anything with me. I remember one of the other kids came and gave me a comic book to read. It would have made the world of difference to know I would be able to see my brothers and sisters.
“Nobody told me where my brothers and sisters were going. It was assumed that there wasn’t a place that would take all five of us but nobody explained.
“When I asked nobody seemed to have concrete answers. It was ‘maybe soon’, there were issues with resources. These were not credible answers for an 11-year-old boy who missed his siblings.”
It took two months, which was spent with a foster carer, until he was able to see them. “It compounded the trauma that my brothers and sisters weren’t there,” he says. “It’s one of the issues that Who Cares has been dealing with for 40 years. There is someone talking about it in our very first magazine in 1979 and in a poem in 1982 and yet it’s still happening.
“The idea that it’s a hassle to keep siblings in contact has to change. This is actual children’s lives. The Government needs to be brave and make the legislation needed to allow the change.”
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