Speech to Parliament
I’m Piper, I’m 20 and I live in the Macquarie Electorate.
Warning, this story may offend your humanity!
Imagine you’re 5, playing in the sandpit, climbing grandfather apple tree, no sense that bad things can happen to you. Not so for kids in foster care, bounced from family to family, never feeling you belong, relationships of trust replaced by shouting, hitting and sexual violation. It happens more than you think.
You do one thing out of place, and you’re forced to eat out of a dog bowl next to the dog. You try to be good so they like will you but inside it feels like you are constantly stepping on shards of glass.
Fast forward. You’re 14. You live in resi (residential care). You’re angry all the time. No one helps and you’re not allowed to help yourself. They think you’re violent but you don’t see it that way, because you’re trying to get away from the pain that you wear like a tattoo across your forehead that screams out kid in care. People look at you and see trouble, stealing cars, the bars of juvie… How’s your humanity? Offended yet? Mine has been offended more times than I can count.
For me that’s not the whole story. At 20, I am out of care and one of 14 in a loving family – tribe. I proudly wear a tattoo which is made up of 3 interconnected languages that all scream family!
In the next 10 years, I want kids in care to be treated with dignity, case workers who do what they say, homes where family is made up of whoever shows up. Parliament needs to change the system, stop treating kids like a transaction, proper assessment of case workers, and in every homestay, the kid gets a tattoo on the heart that says Belong.
Piper
Where stitched dreams fray
In homes with walls that echo change,
Where dreams are stitched but often fray,
Young hearts seek a place to stay,
In foster care uncertainty runs
They carry stories, torn yet bold,
Fragments of a past untold,
In houses built on borrowed hope,
They grasp for threads, for ways to cope.
Some find love, a steady hand,
A family that understands,
But others drift, like leaves alone,
In search of somewhere to call home.
For every child that walks this line,
May they find a light that shines,
A place where love is truly theirs,
Beyond the weight that “fostered” bears.
By Rose Fairall
