Tanny, arrived in Britain as her family’s lone survivor of the Sierra Leonean genocide. Unable to be placed with an adopting family or build meaningful relationships with foster carers, she survived Britain’s notorious children’s home system. Eventually, we would live in the same homeless shelter for youth.
Once upon a time, I marvelled at how easy life in a homeless shelter must seem once you’d survived a genocide. Coming from an unhappy home, but a home with family I foolishly envied the relative improvement in her circumstance in contrast to the disintegration in mine.
For Tanny however, the world was not an easier place to be because she had survived elevated levels of hardship during the Sierra Leonean genocide. In reality, even if life disintegrates all at once, the mind frays in stages. And at 34, this Tuesday, having grown tired she committed suicide.
She had been an investment banking secretary for nearly a decade, earning a wage that put her in the top forty percent of earners. Having long since embraced the fact that she was a lesbian, even as others in her hyper-religious community could not, she was comfortable in her skin. And unlike me, who quietly left the shelter never to return, on her last day of homelessness, she held a party confronting the fear that life outside the shelter would be a continuation of the disaster that had been our lives to date.
However, she was more than an ersatz series of events bandaged together to make a remarkable human being. She offered the mask of stability in a home where none truly existed; on the mornings I was unable or unwilling to get up, she’d open my door and pillow fight me till I left for school. The daily difference between a life fulfilled, and a life regretted. And when evening came, if those she cared for had lost out in the dehumanising and often violent scramble for dinner at the food delivery, she’d bring them something to eat; I often suspect at great cost to herself.
For all that she offered as a person, we barely talked recently, meeting once a year to discuss major changes in our own and the lives of those we’d lived with. Our main topic of conversation was how many of our housemates had gone to prison, disappeared or passed away; many of them would eventually do all three. It was a morbid curiosity that kept us motivated from being yet another statistic.
(For most of us, at one point or another we listed her as our next of kin. And Tanny, being Tanny had kept in touch with as many of us as possible, even visiting those in prison when they were sentenced, and helping them get back on their feet when they left it. And when my former housemates were reported missing, it was usually because she did the reporting.)
By 2018, there were just the two of us. Of the dozens of young people that she had lived with over her two years in the homeless shelter, only the two of us had never been reported missing, entered prison or had yet to die.
Less than 1% of the British population have either lived in care or in a children’s homeless shelter. Yet, a report by Lord Laming for the Prison Reform Trust found that 50% of young people in police custody have lived in care. This is disconcerting when one considers that of the children in state or third sector care, only 2% are there because of “socially unacceptable behaviour;” whilst 98% end up in care because of abuse, neglect or family trauma. It takes entry into the care system, an apparent safety net, to criminalise many young people.
It’s difficult to obtain figures on care leavers and early deaths as they are often only tracked for a maximum of three years after leaving care. Their ability to disappear at a higher rate than other groups also makes collecting this data a challenge. But for the three years that the state keeps in touch with care leavers, they account for 7% of deaths during the ages of 19, 20 and 21. In contrast, they make up less than 1% of the population. With 14% of care leavers living rough on our streets by the time they’re 18, before the data on early death for care leavers is collected, this statistic is highly likely to be an underrepresentation of the true figure.
I don’t really know what to write beyond here. I think I am just furious that mental health provision for care leavers is non existent. Nothing was ever made available for them, or any of us. I am angry that whilst the link between care leavers, homelessness, crime, disappearance and early death has been conclusively proven around the world in a variety of studies that people can be left adrift after leaving what was for many, the only — even if flawed — family system they ever knew.
Though hers was an early death, being in her thirties, Tanny won’t be accounted for in statistics on care leaver early deaths.
When we last met in mid 2019, we jovially argued over who would end up in prison or gruesomely murdered. Tanny joked that my Nigerian heritage meant that prison was a guarantee. In return, I tormented the militant Marxist in her that had found itself working in an investment bank.
We also remembered the first suicide in our cohort, Bianca aged 18, who killed herself the day after leaving the shelter and being lucky to find a home in Golden Lane — Barbican. One of London’s premium housing estates. We emptily promised not to relive that story for the other.
I was as proud of where she had ended up in life as I was sure that if anyone lost our little race, it would be me. I hope she knew of that pride, even as I never said it. And I hope she forgives me as I erase every trace of her and the others we lost along the way from my mind. Because pausing is too hard to consider. And ultimately, until we build a system that supports those leaving care, the show must go on as the alternative is too hard to bear.
