There are lots of quotations about the indifference of bureaucracies and how that aids corruption, abuse, all kinds of harm. There are very few about institutions actually aiding abusers, which is what happened to me and to mum. I don't think that's because it's not true, I think it's because it's not known. It's not known because the victims have no voice probably because they have been so badly harmed. And, because the institution is powerful and the allegation so bad that they must cover it up.
Mum and I were massively harmed by the intervention of Social Workers on behalf of our abuser, but they are perceived to be godlike, beyond reproach, stopping harm not causing it. I think institutional harm, probably especially by social work is far more common than is currently known.
Institutional betrayal is particularly horrific because a victim is harmed by an agency supposed to protect them, that in my case, I went to, on much advice, for protection, who ignored me and then turned on me when the abuser went to them.
This is a list of the institutional complicity which ran between
- The lawyer who let him get away with taking the first lot of money when dad died.
- Social services who didn't investigate the abuse and then actively and knowingly and possibly deliberately traumatised me, complicity with the abuser and who illegally failed to support me as carer in any way.
- The NHS local mental health services who didn't protect me from their abuse and actually at one point tried to hand me back to the very team causing the abuse as a "vulnerable adult"
- The family GP (doctor) who wasn't sure what to do or where to send a suicidal person
- The "At home" NHS team who couldn't really help and just kept me under regular surveillance increasing the sense of being a problem.
- Mum's GPs: one took her off the antidepressants she had been put on when locked up for the first time in Manchester. He said mum seemed in great spirits with us, but I don't even know if Social services bothered asking him or what he said. The other GP I registered mum with also saw mum being cared for regarding a foot problem and back problems she arrived to us with from after the spell in the first rot house. I organised physio for her. That GP apparently sat on the fence at best when social services tried to get a report on me / mum from her. Or that's what it sounded like from the SS report.
- The Office of the Public Guardian who did nothing
- The police who did nothing
- The office of the local Member of the Scottish Parliament (also First Minister of Scotland) who said the council is just a law unto themselves and did very little.
- The supposedly "Independent" Advocacy service which is meant to help you speak to the council when they demand it but who admitted they were given a steer by the council on what the council wanted to know and who quizzed mum about behind closed doors so that the council could invent and distort a wildly biased story of what mum supposedly wanted. We were never allowed to see that report first hand. By then it was clear all forces were moving in one direction.
- The care homes who supported the abuser in refusing to give mum her hearing aids, who complied with his one sided demands to lock mum up, ignoring me, as co- power of attorney who opposed them
- The care agency who initially provided live in carers for mum before he locked her up, (where he could better control her) but only listened to him because he had (behind my back, again obviously), made himself "primary contact".
There is no point mentioning the elder, elder abuse, Alzheimer and trauma charities I went to. They have no real power anyway and they are more part of societal complicity than institutional complicity.
Manipulation of authority
Because perpetrators are so clever they pull the wool over the eyes of those tasked with investigating abuse: in this case of my mum. I read an article a year or two about this, about how easily certain controlling personalities can dupe authorities over abuse and how they are putting processes in place to address this but I saw absolutely no evidence of that.
Social services
Social services here were not just duped and they didn't just stand by. That's what they did at first. I sent at least ten emails to social services and made many phone calls about what was being done to to mum and as a result to me, trying to protect mum. There was not a single acknowledgement. After that, they actively aided the abuser. The primary form of institutional betrayal came, by a long way, from Social Services.
The legacy of that harm, beyond all the trauma and trauma symptoms they caused is that I can't socialise properly. I am constantly afraid of social workers in any context, obviously professional, but even in any social sphere. This team was also responsible for vulnerable adults. and this team caused more harm and damage than any professional I've ever known. There is a profound problem where damage to health and lives is being caused by the people in local government services who are supposed to be stopping harm, protecting people and that is being denied, covered up, not even recognised for their own interests.
Council education department
The same thing had happened with the education department when I complained about a bullying incident with one of my children. There was complete silence regarding the very incident taking place. I complained about how it was handled. They closed ranks. Then they made me the problem. The council is the dangerous and the most harmful "legitimate" entity I know and have ever encountered.
Obtaining complicity
The abuser must have set up a "nothing to see here" scenario with them: appeared competent, apologetic for his "problematic" sibling. It was all done behind my back. But I saw the report against me and I saw the emails the abuser wrote us or social services before he was blocked and they were brimming with lies, distortions, manipulation and narrative control. That was near the start of the trauma, mid 2024.
In those letters and that report there was obviously nothing about all that I'd done for mum charging nothing and obviously nothing about all that he had taken in terms of control and assets nor obviously the intimidation and harassment. He was whiter than white, a saviour actually, the resolution to the problem. I can see the way he would have pitched it: if they could only help him he would make it all go away.
This was part of a broader strategy with friends and family. I watched in silence as the abuser went to the wider family, lied, distorted, got them onside, got one of them who'd never shown the slightest in mum and dad, to visit the country, with her policeman husband to check up on us. He turned a couple of the more aggressive and insincere of mum's friends to his side and spread more lies and distortions about me to the rest, not all of whom believed him and were staggered when they eventually heard what he'd done. I didn't actively go out recruiting people as he did. The first contact I had with mum's friends was when she came to stay with us and I wanted to share her life with us with them and to keep them in touch. The evidence of mum's quality of life with us shone out from that shared album
At least one of these friends supported him with out and out lies about me despite my trying to accommodate her. From whatever angle, I was the problem, obstacle, I had undiagnosed autism, apparently which was "disease" - sick since birth, apparently. I was mentally ill - this much by now was true, not that they had evidence. Certainly they persuaded the council that the harm came from me despite much recent evidence to that very department and many other relevant professions of the contrary. But social services wanted to railroad this campaign against me through their process and they did.
He used the institutions’ weaknesses, which is usually lack of resource to his advantage. Institutions run on straightforward processes. They don’t like anything messy, complex or human. That’s why all institutions are so dehumanising. They remove all humanity from a process or a problem. They like easy tickboxes. The Office of the Public Guardian's processes to engage with Power of Attorney abuse cases are likely triggered more by inputs from other institutions or professionals - banks, care homes, social work.
Few organisations hold a lot of power
Most real power is concentrated in only a few institutions. Other organisations I thought would help just pushed me to Social Services or the Office of the Public Guardian or the police or lawyers them because in serious cases of abuse regarding vulnerable people and asset stripping, they are the only agencies who can do anything and they did nothing. Everything is dealt with by expensive lawyers and / or government agencies.
Strategy: Deny and deflect.
Deny and deflect is such a common strategy within councils at least in Scotland, it now has a name. A mum and campaigner against the institutional abuse in Scotland of handicapped children in Scotland, and winner of the Saltire Award, told me it. You make the complainant the problem. If anyone rocks the boat in any way, you make them the issue.
And it’s so easy to offload on to the victim. Social work followed the abuser's lead: if I became the problem then there was no other much more serious problem of long term abuse involving money to investigate, never mind the ten ignored emails to explain, mum being abducted from her home and locked up, denied her hearing aids, all the missing money. If I was made the problem it all vanished, very conveniently in a puff of smoke.
From a duty of protection to complicit abuse
Once the Social services visiting mum in my house, seeing how happy she was, said they weren't going to "investigate the past" (i.e. the abuse) I was stunned into shock. Then I knew they had taken the abuser's part when they kept insisting we let him take mum out even though they knew he could abduct mum back to his country again. While Pigface had locked mum up, he and Pigwife spent her money in supermarkets. They went out for family meals. He'd taken his family swimming at a luxury hotel at mum's expense. I saw the bank statements. Social work were told and did nothing. He'd abducted mum once and tried to do it a second time against her will. The police heard her say she wanted to say with us. It is why they sent him away.
Instead, social services took over harassing us for him. From what I told them and from the NHS whose door we banged on for protection, that they were traumatising me with panic attacks and shutdowns, terrible hypervigilance and spiralling thoughts. I couldn't walk in the street without hypervigilance. I couldn't go to the supermarket without getting stuck in my car. They didn't just now care. I think they wanted to do it. It was in their interests. They knew that if they made me sick enough, I would be too sick and too scared to fight and none of it would stick to them unless I got lawyers, which I hadn't done so far. I had been completely submissive at every stage. This was the behaviour of someone the abuser had constantly branded a "troublemaker". Social services bet on the right horse. I did become too sick and too scared to fight back. I wanted it all to stop. I wanted to die. I wanted his family to die. All of them so it would all stop and so that that evil could never continue.
Complain?
I didn't complain to the council because I had had plenty of experience and knew the council didn't investigate complaints. Their complaints team were lawyers whose job was to contain and if possible make the complainant the problem. I'd seen it happen twice to me and to friends. It's also a well known strategy within certain local authorities. You can't go to the Ombudsman unless you've been through council and if it's too messy you're liable to be called a "vexatious complainant" anyway at either the council or the Ombudsman. It's a tool to discredit people they don't want to deal with. My experience was, that was probably going to be me. When it gets too complex it's almost automatically vexatious because things that take up time are vexatious.
The police
The bar wasn't high enough for the police to investigate. We went with a story, not evidence because we had blocked the emails, and the ones we had were too distressing for me to go over. We didn't go with the recordings of his phone calls when he hijacked mum's phone. When the abuser realised I'd hang up as soon as he hijacked her conversation he stopped letting her call. We thought telling the police I'd had complete shutdowns after two of these calls would be enough. My husband had had to get the paramedics. It wasn't enough. We went in desperation without the emails and the recordings. I was deeply traumatised. I just needed help and support. We were naive. The police were sympathetic but said in any case, coercion and control only applied in cases of domestic abuse. We tried again in England where the law is different. The police there got the wrong end of the stick, went to the care home who were paid by the abuser using mum's money. He had clearly got in early and told lies and distortions because the police got them from the care home and just parroted them back to me. I felt that I was the one on the stand after that. So we gave up.
Later I ended up in the hospital seemed to be quite shocked to see me so traumatised as to be practically catatonic and could only unlock me with diazepam. None of it counted. Stress responses don't seem to count as "harm" by one person on another. Even suicide almost never
The one thing the police did do was get him off the property after he tried to manipulate mum into going away with him a second time. Even then they allowed him into our house "to say goodbye" even though he'd been "saying goodbye" keeping mum out in the cold on a January night for ninety minutes.
Social work knowingly helped engineer trauma
The next time mum and my abuser came to my house to take mum on a day out after social services insisted on it, they organised for the person they knew was causing trauma to actually come to the house to get mum. It was a manipulation: "It will be best for mum, won't it". As soon as he came to the door and took mum I had another total involuntary shutdown. After that when social services took over the abuse for him, phoned, called, turned up, I had shutdowns or panic attacks every day always while mum with Alzheimers was at daycare. The rest of the time I was looking after her and trying to reverse some of the damage to her health that had been done by 4 months incarceration in the rothouse in England.
The first rothouse phase
The abuser dumped her there, unilaterally, of course having sneakily set it all up in advance. Everything he did was sneaky. He arranged to get married (after 17 years) when he knew dad might die so that he might get a handout. He made sure to take the money just before dad died. He announced the (obviously) secret marriage three days after dad died. Went off abroad to get married on that money when dad wasn't even cold in the grave. Left mum behind. Left me to look after mum as I'd looked after them both before dad died.
Mum phoned and begged me to take her away the first night he left her literally wandering the corridors in that place. "Oh that's normal here" the orderly told me as if it was fine to leave elderly newly arrived people alone distressed and completely confused in corridors. The con of it was that this place was apparently 5 stars.
I had a professional commitment that week, mum was 5 hours away. I didn't go and regretted it. I was also ill, terrified of the abuser and all social services had let him get away with abducting mum like that. It was also supposed to be "temporary", so he'd promised - another lie.
The lack of empathy and professionalism in that "care" home with stunning. They "lost" key letters. When I complained about how they had left mum that first night and tried to find out in what conditions she was being kept, the staff member I spoke to treated like a leper. Well it was her fault it we had no information. She didn't have to tell me. They'd gone through it all with the son. They didn't have any obligation to me, co Power of Attorney or not. I was given no information nor financial information. Already well traumatised, I became too afraid to phone. My husband had to try and get through to mum for me, which was a hit and miss operation at best. They didn't tell me they put mum on antidepressants. Alongside the abuser they tried to blame my sending cards to mum as the cause of her depression, rather than being locked up somewhere she never wanted to be, tricked into being told it was temporary, isolated from her family, her phone controlled, her cards confiscated - so how she was made sick when she didn't receive the cards I don't know. Oh and also the cards arrived after she was put on the antidepressants. That really shows the level of complicity in the abuse of both mum and me.
The second rothouse
We weren't told where social services dumped mum after they took her away. It was one more in the endless promises they made and broke. My husband had to keep trying til he found out. The associations between care homes and the abuser and how mum and I were treated are so bad that I now can't go to new rot house social services and the abuser put her in. mum still doesn't have her hearing aids. The rothouse ignores the requests to give them to her because apparently the son's instructions not to give them to her are more important. After 6 months the fitness she regained with us has completely gone. Her hair is unkempt. We have no idea what she does.
I get panic attacks if I go there. My husband has to go and get her. We take her out for coffee. I'm too afraid to do anything else.
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