My own 'accidental' whistle-blowing in a children's home.

One week into my new job in a psycho-therapeutic community for children, I was helping serve up lunch to the eight children in my assigned house. One of the ten-year-old girls (a very small and slight child) cheeked my shift-leader (a six-foot eighteen stone bloke) and he went for her. He got her into a hold and dragged her screaming and kicking into another room where we couldn’t see what was going on and stayed there with her for about forty minutes – twenty minutes of which the screaming continued, and twenty minutes of which there was an ominous silence. There was only one other member of staff in addition to me on duty at the time – an agency woman on her first day. I can only think that the shift-leader did not consider that either of us were of any consequence. I was horrified at his behaviour. But we had to look after the other seven 7-10 year-old children, all of whom were inclined to violence, running away and/or sexually abusing each other so could not be left for a moment, and could not be left with only one member of staff. So neither of us could go and find out what was happening, especially as neither of us knew the kids yet so could easily be manipulated by them, and the man doing the restraint was our superior - one of the two deputy-heads and shift-leaders of the house. I turned to the agency woman. “You’ve worked in lots of other children’s homes – have you ever seen anything like this happening anywhere else?” I didn’t know how to assess the situation fully as I had only been working a week. I had had to undergo three forty-eight hour interviews to get the job, and this was a highly respected establishment with a long waiting list for kids to get into it, and I could not compute what was going on – I had not expected this sort of behaviour. She shook her head with wide eyes. “No, I haven’t. Are you going to report this?” “I’ll bring it up at ‘supervision’,” I promised. In the contract that we signed on being hired, staff were promised ‘supervision’ meetings once a fortnight. I didn’t get my first supervision until three weeks in. It was with another shift-leader/deputy. He asked me if I had any questions. I said that I was concerned about what the rules for restraint were, and then explained the circumstances that had triggered my query. He looked shocked and demanded why I hadn’t mentioned it before. I pointed out that I hadn’t seen any of the other shift-leaders or the House Manager for ten days and that my supervision was a week late. He got me to write it all down. Then, next day, was an in-house training day when all the staff were brought together while the children were at the on-site school. I arrived on the dot of the appointed time to find every other member of the team already sitting in a big circle, and as soon as I sat down, the leader of the house laid into us all, shouting at us and individually challenging every staff member about what we had ‘to say for ourselves’. I was unaware at that point that the whole group, including the ‘offending’ shift-leader, had, just five minutes before I’d walked in, all been informed about what I had reported. No one had spoken to me since my ‘supervision’ meeting, and certainly no one had let me know that everyone, including the guy I had reported, would immediately be told what I had said in my ‘confidential’ supervision session. After the meeting, one of the support staff secretly rang me up and begged me to report what another child had told her about what this same man had done. This child had been the one to discover the dead body of his own father hanging by his neck from a beam and was very disturbed and traumatised and hated his neck being touched. He had come to her crying and saying that the shift-leader had grabbed him up by the collar of his clothing and dangled him by the neck off the ground. She claimed that she would have told the bosses herself, but she was on holiday for a week, and could I do it for her? I was pissed off that she was using me to do her dirty work. She’d obviously had this piece of information for some time and not done anything about it, but now I was going to be the fall-guy for all this. But given the importance of the information, I couldn’t neglect to pass it on. As I had expected, it was ill-received, as it looked as though I was just trouble-stirring and trying to dredge up more ammunition. The man was suspended for six weeks while he had ‘counselling’ and then he was rehabilitated back to the house on the opposite shift to me. But just one week later I was swopped shifts so that he was my line manager again. I was given one ‘supervision’ meeting during the time he was off, and then I was only offered one other ‘supervision’ meeting over the whole of the next six months. Four months later the offending shift-leader was de-facto ‘promoted’ and put to work in the special small house where there was only one very violent child and two members of staff, where he would spend a lot of his time alone and unsupervised with the child. What do you make of that?