CASE STUDY: BRENDAN: BRENDAN doesn't say much. When he does, his speech is slurred and difficult to understand. But he's aware of everything that goes on around him.
“That’s the problem,” says his sister, Bridget. “He’s moderately mentally handicapped. If he was severely, he’d be better off. He wouldn’t be so aware of what happened to him in the past, the effect it had on him. It’s destroyed his life.”
As a young boy, his parents were advised to place Brendan in a special residential school in Cork. “He was a happy little chap back then, and very much part of the family,” recalls his sister. “Then, over time, we noticed him getting very aggressive. It was so out of character. He came back from there on the minibus, and we were told he’d threatened to kill the driver.”
His behaviour continued to deteriorate. The frustration would build up inside him to the point where he’d fly into a rage, becoming abusive and aggressive to everyone around him. He developed a hatred of authority.
Brendan was placed in a succession of unsuitable and inappropriate services, each more restrictive than the last. At one point he was put in a psychiatric hospital to control his violent outbursts.
Today, after many years, he’s finally in a place he and his family like – a community setting with four others. He has individualised care. He’s more contented and loves to see his family.
As well as being happier, he has started to open up. He has told his family, tentatively, about the serial sexual abuser at the residential centre in which he stayed as a child; how he lived in terror of repeated abuse; how he felt he couldn’t tell anyone.
“He did dirty things to me. He stuck his private parts up my bum. It was very sore. He did it to the others as well, in the spudhouse. If I wouldn’t do it with him, he said he’d throw me in with the pigs.”
He told a consultant psychiatrist as part of an assessment recently.
“It was in a galvanised shed. I saw him do the same with others when I was looking through a broken window. Lots of people knew about him and the awful things.”
There were more recent sexual assaults, too. He had been assaulted by another service user – with a known history of sexual offending – at a sheltered workshop run by health authorities.
“We couldn’t believe it,” his sister says. “It accounted for everything: his behaviour, his frustration. Everything. We were told nothing.”
The psychiatrist’s report says Brendan has suffered multiple traumatic effects of sexual abuse, including cognitive and behavioural problems, and notes he has never been able to form a trusting relationship with the opposite sex.
His sister puts its more bluntly. “He’s not really a survivor,” she says. “His life has been destroyed by this. He had such great potential, but he’s been ruined by it all.”
