Personal Stories/Opinions
Last Updated:
Who are we?
I've spent last week looking at television programmes marking the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and the I begin to think of people like myself.
Oh what a price we paid for the men who never married the women they left pregnant. Many of us are the forgotten children. We were put into care, sent around the world to people that were in many cases, unfit to look after us. Mothers and fathers walked away from us. Did they ever think of us in the following years? Did they remember our birthday's - it would seem not.
We were orphaned to fend for ourselves with no family members to turn to. Now we search for any member of our family that might still be alive to explain something, anything to us. Where we were born? Do we have any brothers or sisters? If we do, do they know about us? Has anyone told them of our existence?
Sixty years on and thousands of us who were abused in so many ways are asking: Why did it happen? Why was it allowed to happen? How many of us have had our basic Human Rights taken away from us. It seems that the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse will never get to the truth - those with the answers to our questions are, in many cases, dead.
Now we try to find any records that might have been kept on us, we travel many miles, we spend many hours in libraries going through the archives in search of even one slip of paper that will give us even the slightest clue as to where we came from and more importantly, who we are?
Kathy
Email the author.
