Shaking off stigma

IT doesn't pay to look towards the future, Karl Hesmondhalgh says. It never turns out the way you hope. For a 21-year-old it seems a desperately pessimistic thing to say. But he speaks from bitter experience.

"I've never really been an optimist," he says. "If I expect anything to happen, it doesn't. If I look forward to something, it always goes wrong."

The statistics show he has reason for pessimism. Young people such as Karl who were brought up in council care are far more likely to face homelessness and unemployment, or turn to drugs or crime, than those brought up in a caring family.

In a sense, the real miracle about Karl is how well he has turned out. He's articulate, well-educated, apparently confident and, while he doesn't have a job yet, is determined to get one. He has a stack of City and Guilds qualifications in computer programming, a 'brilliant CV' and, in his own words, does well at interviews.

Below the surface, though, lurks a chronic sense of low self-esteem.

Karl went into care at 14, moving from a home to a succession of foster placements and then back to another home, all in the York area. It has left some painful scars.

"I remember one of my friends came over to see me once," he says. "When he went back home, his parents asked where he had been. He told them, and they banned him from seeing me. Because I was in care."

It's a prejudice felt keenly by any young person brought up in care - and one that adds to their already low sense of self-esteem at not having parents like everyone else.

Now, in an attempt to make other people realise what it is like, Karl and a group of other young people like him in York have got together to create a film about their experiences.

Care To Listen is a moving testament to their lives - and a plea for greater understanding. Its central message is summed up by the voice-over that accompanies the opening titles: "Because you were in care, people just think you were all evil little kids, were all bad."

Carl Burns, another of the young people featured in the film, seems at first a classic case of the kid in care gone wild.

Taken into care almost from the day he was born, he was at first fostered with two of his brothers. Then they were separated, and he was moved from foster carer to foster carer.

He let his anger and unhappiness out through bad behaviour.

"I got expelled from all my schools," he says. "I was just fighting, hitting people, telling teachers to f*** off, just being a nasty person, really."

At 12 he went to a foster family in Middlesbrough, moving back to York at 16 to live in supported lodgings. It didn't work out, and eventually social services got him a council flat in Clifton.

By now he was into drugs and alcohol and mixing with a crowd who got him involved in petty crime. He says he was being constantly arrested.

Then, four years ago, he met his girlfriend, Serena. He took her out with some of his 'mates' and she made it clear she wouldn't put up with them. Carl faced a stark choice.

"It was carry on being an a*******, or become a normal person," Carl, now 21, says.

He chose Serena. He dumped most of his 'mates', is off the drugs, and now has his drinking under control. His ambition is to be a horticulturist.

With Serena's help he has begun to turn his life around.

But, like Karl Hesmondhalgh, there is still a long way to go before he will be confident in his future.

He is still looking for a job - and, like many young people who leave care without anyone to advise them on how to set up home, find a flat and a job and or cope with paying bills, he has massive unpaid debts he simply can't afford to settle.

It's the struggle to cope with life as they branch out on their own that's the main theme of Care To Listen? Because the disadvantages suffered by young people brought up in care don't come to an end when they leave that care.

Leaving home is difficult enough for all of us. But if you have no family to turn to for support in times of need, you can find yourself utterly alone.

Julie Longworth, City of York Council's leaving care support manager, admits that too often in the past, local authorities did fail youngsters when it came time for them to leave. From the age of just 16, they often found themselves utterly alone and expected to fend for themselves.

Unlike other young people with anxious parents watching their every move, they had no one to lend them money, no one to teach them how to manage their finances or help them find a job or somewhere to live.

That is what happened to Tricia Dickinson. A few weeks after her 16th birthday she found herself completely on her own after leaving her foster parents.

She managed to find a run-down bedsit - but for the next seven months lived in hell.

"It was damp, it was mouldy, there was only one scrap of curtain," she says. "There was just one electric cooker to share between tenants on two floors, and just one bathroom."

To make things worse, the occupants of all the other bedsits in the building were single, adult men. Tricia admits she was too scared sometimes even to go to the bathroom, because she had to pass three other rooms to get there.

Also, she didn't have any money. She ended up begging in Hull Road - and at one point came close to committing suicide. "I didn't have anything, and didn't think I ever would."

She was 'saved' by a friend, a former social worker, who invited her to live with her, and who helped her turn her life around.

Now, at 24, she's a supervisor with the DSS, and has three children that are the centre of her life.

"They are going to have a better life than I ever had," she says.

It's the courage and determination of young people like Karl, Tricia and Carl that make Care To Listen? so inspiring.

For them, learning to cope on their own in an adult world was difficult, dangerous - and horribly lonely.

For youngsters now in care, however, the future looks better.

Specialist support for care leavers was put into place in York just over four years ago - and, thanks to new legislation, since October this year there has been a 'leaving care team' in York whose job is to help young people about to begin lives of their own.

The team can help to arrange accommodation, teach young people how to manage their finances and cope with bills, arrange job-training and further education - and, perhaps most important, simply be there in times of need.

It won't give back Tricia, Karl or Carl their lost childhoods.

But at least never again will young people like them be expected to face a hostile world completely alone.

Updated: 10:43 Thursday, November 22, 2001