Showing titles in Child Abuse

The heartbreaking story of three little children searching for someone to love them. Maggie Hartley faces one of the toughest challenges of her career when three abused and neglected siblings she’s been caring for are placed for adoption with a family she believes are unsuitable. The couple are looking for a perfect ready-made family, and Maggie knows that they’re not going to find it with these traumatised children. 

The No. 1 Sunday Times Bestseller. At just eight years old, Jodie is violent, aggressive and extremely challenging. Five carers in four months have been unable to cope, but there is one last hope: Cathy Glass… As Jodie begins to trust Cathy and make progress, shocking details about her past...

Thirty years since the death of Fred West and the conviction of his wife Rose, in 1995, the West murder case exerts a magnetic fascination for true crime listeners. The Wests claimed twelve victims, young women and girls including members of their own family. Nine mutilated bodies were found buried under their home at 25 Cromwell St, Gloucester, the so-called House of Horrors. The Fred West Tapes incorporates remarkable new evidence and primary source testimony, including the experiences of the West children and victim families.

The fifteenth fostering memoir by Cathy Glass. Danny was petrified and clung to me in desperation as I carried him to my car. Trapped in his own dark world, he couldn't understand why his parents no longer loved or wanted him, and were sending him away. While Danny’s parents have everything...

‘Each time my mother laid a finger on me… it was another step into the jaws of hell. Her abuse, more so than any other, destroyed me. It was the ultimate betrayal.’ Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant...

Diego and his siblings live in desperate poverty, but nobody seems to notice or care as they come close to starving, scouring food banks to survive. But he’s wrong–someone has noticed him. County Lines gang members can see his vulnerability. With an absent father, alcoholic mother and dependent young siblings, Diego is the perfect mark.

In this much-anticipated third volume, Kat recounts her early-mid teen years. Still traumatised by her early experiences, she was however not entirely without that sense of hope that is the inalienable property of youth.

Innocent is the shocking true story of little Molly and Kit, siblings, aged 3 years and 18 months, who are brought into care as an emergency after suffering non-accidental injuries. Aneta and Filip, the children’s parents, are distraught when their children are taken into care. Aneta maintains...

Damian longs for home, but one man stands in his way … Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves her three young children dearly, but she is vulnerable, naive and unable to cope on her own. Cathy sets about helping Damian overcome his...

The Watsons are no strangers to sibling placements, but when Casey takes the call from her supervising social worker one frosty January morning, she can instantly tell from the tone of her colleague’s voice that there’s a complicated case ahead. And she’s right. A four-day-old baby boy called Tommy - born in prison - plus his four-year-old half-brother, the lively Seth. A month later, the very moment she gets out of prison, the boys’ mother - a 19-year-old called Jenna - also follows.

When six-week-old Jasmine is placed in her care, foster mother Maggie Hartley is delighted to have a baby in the house again. Maggie's been given temporary custody of Jasmine after social services were concerned that the baby was failing to thrive and develop. With Maggie's love and care, Jasmine soon flourishes into a healthy, happy baby - but it is clear that all is not quite as it seems with her mum, Hailey.

Thrust into state care at six months of age because of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, Teresa Cooper spent an unsettled childhood in a variety of children's homes. At age 13, she was sent to Kendall House in Gravesend, Kent, a home which soon became her prison and worst nightmare. Teresa found herself a victim of a terrible regime: she was injected with dangerously high doses of drugs and sexually abused.

In the best-selling tradition of Smashed and The Glass Castle, this raw, eye-opening memoir tells the powerful story of Elizabeth Garrison's fractured childhood, descent into teenage drug addiction, and struggle to overcome nearly insurmountable odds. Elizabeth invites the listener behind the closed doors of a picture-perfect Christian family to reveal a dark, hidden world of child abuse, domestic violence, and chilling family secrets all performed in the name of God under the tyrannical rule of her father. 

Bestselling author and foster carer Casey Watson shares the shocking true story of Tyler, an abused eleven-year-old who, after stabbing his step-mother, had nowhere else to go. Knowing a little of Tyler’s past – his biological mother, a heroin addict, died of an overdose when he was three...

Following her disastrous first year in the adult world, it's hard to imagine how seventeen-year-old Keri's life could possibly get any worse. However, as anyone who's ever been down can attest to, getting back up can often be difficult without a helping hand...But what if all the hands around you only want to push you down further?

In 1976, Francis Beaumont spirited 11-year-old Kim Chown and her brother away from their mother to Africa, where he had taken a job as a university lecturer. There, behind a veneer of respectability, he terrorised and brutalised his own child, Kim, sexually and emotionally abusing her several times a day. Only aged 20 did Kim feel able to escape from him, descending into alcoholism, after her siblings and mother refused to help her seek justice. But after almost ending her own life, Kim fought back.

Rejected by her mother and excluded by her school, Flip is a little girl desperate to be loved. ‘Am I ugly, Mummy?’ are the first words that little Phillipa says to Mike and Casey as she stomps into their lives on a hot August afternoon. She has a Barbie doll in one hand and a pink vanity...

Casey Watson is back, doing the job she does best - rolling up her sleeves and fostering the children who, on first meeting, seem like hopeless cases. But when she meets Miller and discovers the truth about his disturbing childhood, even Casey begins to doubt if this child will ever be able to accept love. Found naked and alone on a railway track, Miller was just five when he was first admitted into the care system. 

When Marc was a small child, his father committed suicide. When his mother remarried, Marc thought his life was going to be OK but he could never have imagined just what was going to happen... Unloved is Marc's powerful story of sinking into the depths of addiction and despair and then finding the inner strength to rise above it. Marc is now at peace with his past and leads a happy and productive life.

A 5-year-old boy, Ethan, is brought to Casey in the middle of the night after the sudden death of his young mother after a drug overdose. Estranged from her parents, Ethan’s mum had been abused by her ex-partner, and began taking drugs to cope. Ethan is obviously lost and bewildered, and...