Lost Child by Torey Hayden

Author:Torey Hayden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

chapter seventeen

On Thursday we had a team meeting – myself, Meleri, Ben, two other social workers, another representative of my charity, and, because the case with Joseph was still ongoing, a woman from the police, named Ceridwen Davies, whom everyone called Crid.

Very early on in the meeting the conversation turned to Jessie’s issues with telling the truth. Ben, the child psychologist, spoke at length about reactive attachment disorder and how lying becomes such an ingrained behaviour for these children. He explained how a baby is totally dependent on others for survival and life is all about getting needs met – being hungry and getting fed, being dirty and getting changed, being upset and getting comforted. When these needs are met consistently, the baby learns to trust adults to take care of him or her. When this doesn’t happen or it happens inconsistently, the baby learns that people can’t be trusted, that the world is unsafe, that others don’t care. Ben said it was during this early childhood period that lying begins to establish itself. The child learns to cope by telling him or herself lies: ‘It’s okay my mother is gone. I don’t really need her. I don’t need to eat now. I don’t want anyone to play with me. I can take care of myself.’ Lying is a way for the child to take control of the situation. It’s a survival technique.

Ben said we always had to keep this in mind: Jessie lied to stay alive. Not to be annoying or deceitful, but to survive. And so far, it had worked. She was still here. This meant she was likely to default to it any time she felt threatened. In dealing with Jessie, Ben told us that it was important that she could not play one of us off against the other. We had to assume she was going to tell us many different versions of what had happened with Joseph, that she would tell different versions to different people, and that none of them might agree with what Joseph told the police. Our only recourse was to collect up every single version and see if we could distil any truth from them. Ben said this was the key to working with Jessie. We had to talk to each other. We had to make sure each of us knew what Jessie was saying to the others. We had to trust each other because we couldn’t trust her. And one more thing, he said. It was important for each of us to convey to Jessie that while we didn’t trust her to tell the truth and wouldn’t let her get away with her lies, this did not stop us from being able to care very much about her and wanting to help her.

One of the other social workers then articulated what was going through my mind. What if Jessie genuinely had suffered abuse at Glan Morfa? How would we know?

Ah, Ben said, we must also be alert to the possibility that, for all her lying, Jessie sometimes did tell the truth.

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