Casey Watson - Little Prisoners

And there was more to come. As we notched up a full second week with the children, I began to realise how knowledgeable they were about their bodies, and how lacking in personal boundaries they were. That they were close was obviously good, but they were physically a bit too close, touching one another in inappropriate places, and with what looked like very clear sexual overtones.

It’s generally not useful to over-analyse sexual touching in young children. It’s normal for little ones to want to explore their whole bodies, and to introduce sanctions, or adult notions of sex and propriety, can only result in creating a tension around it, which can lead to emotional problems later on. But these little ones seemed so sexual, it was confirming my suspicion that whilst their parents might have neglected them in terms of attending to their needs, someone – this granddad, almost certainly, and others? – had actually been paying them quite a lot of attention. Children simply didn’t do some of the things these two were doing, not without there being some adult input.

It was to be Lauren, Kieron’s girlfriend, who’d get the next piece of tangible evidence of what I was fast believing to be a worrying state of affairs.

Lauren was currently on her summer break from college, where she was studying dance and drama, and was often round at the moment, helping Kieron with his job-hunting. It was the following Tuesday, and the two of them were on the computer, in the living room, trawling the internet while the children were playing on the floor with building bricks. Kieron had come out in the kitchen to get a drink, and the two of us were having a chat about progress, when Lauren appeared in the doorway, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘Um, Casey,’ she said. ‘Can you come back in the living room a second? It’s the kids.

They’re … well …’

She didn’t finish her sentence and didn’t need to. I could tell by her expression that something weird must be going on.

I put my mug of coffee down and followed her back in, wondering what it was I might find.

I saw Ashton first. He was lying face down on the sofa, on top of Olivia, who was lying face up. Ashton was busy gyrating his torso, as if simulating sex, while his little sister lay, pretty much passively, beneath him, except for the fact that she was doing something else. She was rhythmically patting his bottom.

‘Ashton!’ I snapped. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Stop that immediately! Get off your poor sister!’ I crossed the room and pulled the two of them up. I then sat them down, side by side, on the settee. ‘Now,’ I said sternly. ‘I need you to tell me what you were doing.’

There was a predictable silence from both for a moment, Ashton looking doggedly at the floor, his shoulders drooping, though little Olivia was grinning from ear to ear. Then she spoke, and at the same time placed her hand inside her shorts. ‘We were just tickling our pee pees, that’s all.’

I kept my stern face in place, but knelt down to their level. ‘Stop that, Olivia,’ I said. She pulled her hand back out again. ‘We don’t do things like that in front of other people, okay, sweetheart? Your body is private,’ I explained.

‘Yeah,’ said Ashton, who’d suddenly become animated, watching her. ‘We can only do that in our bedroom, Liv, stop it!’ He leaned towards her. ‘Remember – walls have ears!’ ‘An’ eyes, too!’ she answered, dramatically, gesturing to her own now. ‘Sorry, Ash,’ she finished. ‘I forgetted.’

If the implications of what they were saying hadn’t been so awful, their choice of words would have almost sounded comic. As it was, it was chilling, and a picture came immediately to mind: of this ‘Gwandad’ or whoever, making it clear to these poor mites just how important it was to keep their secret.

‘No!’ I said, firmly. ‘We don’t touch people like that at all! Not down here, not in your bedrooms, not anywhere. Walls don’t have ears, or eyes, but other people do. Other people who know it isn’t right to touch others’ private parts.’

They both stared at me in utter confusion. Which made it hit home to me even harder. They simply didn’t understand me. They so obviously thought what they were doing was normal. Except not quite, as they clearly knew – well, Ashton did, anyway – that the adults close to them wanted it kept a secret.

‘Not even family, Casey?’ Ashton asked me, quite innocently, as if he was in a classroom asking a teacher a question. ‘It’s all right if it’s family. It doesn’t matter if it’s family.’

‘Yes, it does matter, love,’ I tried to explain to him. ‘Our bodies belong only to us, d’you understand? Which means it’s wrong to let someone else touch our private parts. It’s wrong of them to do that to you. Even family.’

They both stared at me, two pairs of wide, uncomprehending eyes. They really didn’t understand what I was on about. I stood up again, and glanced across at Kieron and Lauren, who were still framed in the doorway, open-mouthed. We exchanged a look that said it all; if it was as entrenched as it appeared, this was going to be a massive thing to deal with. A five-minute chat with them wouldn’t even scratch the surface.

Taking my rising as a cue that the lecture was over, the children both got up off the sofa, and began playing with the building blocks again. Whatever they were building, all I could think of was icebergs. And how I’d just got a glance at the great seething mass beneath the tip of this one.

I spent much of the week that followed making notes on the computer, carefully recording every incident I witnessed and reporting it by email to both John and Anna. There was clear evidence here of an even darker family background, and it was vital the authorities know about it, particularly with the hearing coming up. I also recalled the allegation of abuse by their father’s cousin. No smoke without fire? Maybe so.

But it wasn’t just the sexual behaviour that was disturbing. Just as difficult a problem to try and manage was the children’s lack of hygiene and their toileting behaviour.

I had already started waging a war on poo, as it had become clear from the start that the first night’s bout of bed wetting was by no means a one-off, brought on by stress. It was actually the tip of another iceberg in itself – this one composed mainly of excrement. If my nose had been wrinkling in distaste on Day Two, it was positively beginning to curl up now. The children had clearly not had any sort of potty or toilet training. Ashton just always seemed to poo in his pants, and the little one seemed to have no consistent pattern – so I was soon finding bits of faeces everywhere. There would also be smears of it on the toilet walls, and on the walls of the children’s bedrooms – even, on more than one occasion, on my banister. It was sickening and I began to feel nervous about touching anything, not before I’d zapped it with bleach.

And, as with the sexual behaviours, nothing I said seemed to sink in.

‘Olivia,’ I said to her one day, having taken her by the hand, up to the toilet, so that we could together take a look at what she’d used to decorate the toilet wall. The smell was so intense that I was gagging as I did so, but she seemed completely oblivious. ‘Do you know what that is?’ I said, pointing. She nodded and smiled.

‘Poo!’ she said, grinning. ‘It’s poo! Poo poo poo!’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Poo. And now poor Casey has to clean it. And that’s not very nice for me, is it?’ She looked at me blankly. The concept of ‘cleaning’ was obviously new to her, and I wondered in what sort of God-awful place she must have lived. ‘Look, sweetie,’ I said gently, once I’d banished the offending streaks. ‘Let me show you how we go to the toilet, okay?’