She was wrong … this is her staggering true story.‘This must be what prison is like,’ I thought as another hour crawled by. In fact, prison would be better … at least you knew your sentence. You could tick off the days until you got out. In the Bad Room we had no idea how long we’d serve.After years of constant abuse, Jade thought her foster mother Carol Docherty would be the answer to her prayers. Loving and nurturing, she offered ten-year-old Jade a life free of fear.But once the regular social-worker checks stopped, Carol turned and over the next six years Jade and three other girls were kept prisoner in a bedroom they called the ‘bad room’.Shut away for 16 hours at a time, they were starved, violently beaten, forbidden from speaking or using the toilet and routinely humiliated. Jade was left feeling broken and suicidal.This is the powerful true story of how one woman banished the ghosts of her past by taking dramatic action to protect the life of every vulnerable child in care.

    After she’s picked up by the police, and with nowhere else to go, she is locked in a secure unit with young offenders. Social Services beg specialist foster carer Angela to take her in, but can she keep the testing 12-year-old safe? And will Angela ever learn what, or who, drove Melissa to run and hide, sometimes in the dead of night? The Girl in the Dark is the sixth book from well-loved foster carer Angela Hart. A true story that shares the tale of one of the many children she has fostered over the years. Angela's stories show the difference that quiet care, a watchful eye, and sympathetic ear can make to those children whose upbringing has been less fortunate than others.

    Maggie welcomes the three children into her home, and is touched by the gentle care Leo shows to the two little girls. It is clear that Lexie and Amelie adore their big brother, and rely on him for comfort and reassurance. But Leo has experienced the neglect and abuse of his mother and her partner for far longer than his sisters, and is struggling with an eating disorder and showing signs of OCD.When Social Services begin to look at adoptive families for the children, Maggie is horrified when they suggest that the two angelic little girls will have a much better chance of being adopted without their damaged older brother. Knowing the impact that losing his sisters forever will have on vulnerable Leo, they face the ultimate dilemma. Should the children stay together and dash the hope of them ever having a forever family? Or do they sacrifice the close bond between the siblings to give the girls a chance to be adopted?

    He also saw their amazing ability to survive those unpromising beginnings. In this book, he tells four heartbreaking true stories of damaged children and of his battle to help them.

    Aggressive, confrontational, and often running away, Jackson’s mother puts him into foster care.He remains volatile. Cathy, his carer, encourages Jackson to talk about what has happened but he won’t engage. His actions continue to test and worry everyone. Adrian, Cathy’s son, fears for her safety.Then in a dramatic turn of events, the true reason for Jackson’s behavior comes to light, and it’s far darker than Cathy could ever have imagined…

    She slipped through the net and only just survived. Her childhood was a place of filth and terror. Her prostitute mother abused and neglected Collette; leaving her with clients, starving her and beating her to a pulp.But the worst thing was that the people who were supposed to protect Collette turned a blind eye. This is the story of a little girl who waited years for justice. It's the story of a woman determined to protect other children from suffering her fate.Collette Elliott is a 35-year-old mother of four. She was born in Birmingham to Maureen Batchelor, a prostitute, and suffered years of physical and mental abuse. In April 2013, Birmingham City Council awarded her £20,000 in damages for the anguish she suffered and their failure to protect her. Collette is now happily married, a devoted mother to her girls, and is campaigning on behalf of other child abuse victims.

    When I finally entered the real world, evil was waiting.’ A shocking true account of one girl’s harrowing journey to survival.Sophie Crockett spent most of her childhood suffering from crippling anxiety. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, she became a virtual prisoner in her own home, afraid to venture outside. After battling with depression, eating disorders and self-harm, Sophie had the courage to re-enter society in her late teens.She was just 17 when she fell prey to ST, a violent bully who exploited her vulnerability and cruelly assumed complete coercive control over her life. He kept Sophie captive and refused to leave her alone; fed her, bathed her, even escorted her to the toilet. Sophie endured countless tirades of mental and physical abuse, kept as his sex slave while he repeatedly threatened to kill her.She was convinced it was the end. But through her bravery, and with little help from the authorities, Sophie was able to escape.This is her story.

    This is my first impression of her. A quiet little sparrow of a girl.' In her brand new series 'Thrown Away Children', Louise Allen shares the harrowing stories she is exposed to as a foster mother. The first in the series, Stella's Story, tells the astonishing true story of a young girl scarred by an abusive past.Named after the lager that christened her at birth, Stella's life is characterised instability and neglect. Her teenage mother abandons her in the first few weeks of her life, and left in the 'care' of her father, she ends up lying deserted in a house with no food, no water, no clothes, and no warmth.She eventually lands in the care of foster carer Louise, who is determined to change her life for the better. Things seem to be going well - but when Stella has a startling response to having her photo taken, it becomes clear the scars of her abuse run deeper than anyone could have ever guessed.

    Taylor tries desperately not to fit in, to be the tough young teen that she has had to become, making it clear that she cares about nothing and no-one, while Reece is just desperate for someone to love him. Rosie finds herself battling an unknown monster in their past, as social media and the Internet become a means to control and manipulate the siblings while in her care. And then a more sinister turn of events causes Rosie to dig into their past, desperate to discover the truth before her time with them is over and they must be returned to their family.

    And he found his perfect victim. A true story of the ultimate deception.25-year-old Megan Henley put her five-year-old daughter to bed one evening and switched on her laptop. A Facebook ‘friend request’ seemed to be genuine. There were a few common friends and very similar interests, so Megan accepted.With that one simple act, she changed her life forever. In her words: ‘looking back on it, it was as if I had opened my front door to a stranger, as if I had thrown away every precaution I’d ever put in place, as if I had freely given access to my whole world – all because of some naïve belief that it was ‘just’ a friend request on a social media site.’ Megan is tricked into a relationship, paranoia and ultimately betrayal by the man she loved and trusted but nothing is as it seems.

    Plunged into a care system that neglected them, Isobel and Alex were expected to come to nothing, and had only each other to rely on.Isobel and Alex’s mother used to do everything with them. A full-time teacher, she dedicated herself to her children, partly in order to give them every possible opportunity in life, and partly to keep them out of the way of their increasingly eccentric, erratic and unpleasant father.Their father, a violent and frightening man, spent most of his time locked in his bedroom, a room the rest of the family never ventured into. He became increasingly bitter and angry at the outside world in general, and at his wife and children in particular. The local community feared his outbursts as much as Isobel and Alex did, but the neighbours saw far less of him as he became increasingly housebound. No one came to the Kerr’s house to visit.When Isobel was 15 and Alex 13, they came home from school to find police everywhere. Their father had stabbed their mother between fifty and sixty times with a sharpened chisel. As far as anyone could tell the attack was unprovoked and of incredible savagery, but the children were given the minimum amount of information. No one wanted to upset them unnecessarily.Their mother had been an only child and they had never been in contact with their father's family. There was no one else for them to turn to - except each other.This is an inspiring story of a brother and sister who only had each other, and a powerful testament to what can be achieved through courage and love.

    It reveals three lives, separate but entwined, that have experienced unspeakable horror, unrelenting loyalty and unforgettable courage.From as early as three years old, Juliana, Celeste and Kristina were treated as sexual beings by their 'guardians' in the infamous religious cult known as the Children of God. They were made to watch and mimic orgies, received love letters and sexual advances from men old enough to be their grandfather, and were forced into abusive relationships. They were denied access to formal schooling, had to wander the streets begging for money, and were mercilessly beaten for 'crimes' as unpredictable as reading an encyclopaedia.Finally, unable to live with the guilt of what had happened to her children, their mother escaped with Kristina, cutting herself off from her remaining children in a bid to save at least one child. Desperate to save her sisters, Kristina eventually returned to the place of her torture to free Celeste. Years later, Juliana found the courage to escape, knowing that the child she was carrying would be subjected to the same fate if she did not.Now the three sisters have finally come together to reveal in full and horrific detail their existence within the Children of God cult. Their stories reveal a community spread throughout the world and its legacy of anorexia, depression, drug abuse, suicide and even murder. Lives are ripped apart and painstakingly mended with a shared strength that finally enabled the sisters to free themselves from the shadows of their past.

    She stopped at no lengths in her campaign to tear him to pieces both mentally and physically. In his chilling memoir, Alex describes how he received the most unnecessary and appalling treatment in mental institutions because of her actions, to the point where his mental and physical health deteriorated to a perilous state. Covering her tracks with cunning deception, his mother began by beating him repeatedly and forcing him to take a dangerous mix of amphetamines and Valium. His health already in balance, and raped by an uncle, the professionals believed his mother's lies. Mental asylums in Greece and the UK followed, as did isolation cells and ECT. But his mother's hatred was to take a more sinister turn still - how much more could Alex take and still survive? Not since Sickened has there been a book that catalogues a child's experience of being made devastatingly ill at the hands of their mother. Dramatic and uniquely shocking, this is a memoir that will haunt the reader long after they close the final page.

    Humiliated, ostracised and brainwashed, her spirit had been crushed. But as the realisation of what she was subjecting her children to began to sink in, she found new strength and determination -- the strength to try to escape the world that had consumed her for so long. Sarah was never a troublesome child. She smoked and drank a bit when she was underage, and shoplifted once, but she was generally well-behaved and didn't mean to upset her mum and dad. But Sarah's parents had seen first hand what could happen when a teenager went off the rails. Scared the same would happen to Sarah, they sent her away, many miles from home, to a church school that would put a stop to her bad behaviour. They had no idea they were sending Sarah to a place where she would be forced into obedience -- a place that sanctioned force-feeding and beating in order to smash a child's will. They had no idea she would end up marrying a boy from the cult, and cutting the rest of her family out of her life. Or that she would begin to treat her own children in the same way -- believing there was no other option, and that everyone in the outside world was evil. But she did. And the day they sent Sarah away to the little church school miles from home was the last time they saw their real daughter for over a decade. Until one day when Sarah found the courage to fight back, the strength to protect her children and bravely venture into the world she believed was full of evil. This is Sarah's story -- the shocking but ultimately inspiring true story of her struggle to save her children from the suffering she was forced to endure.

    I am more afraid of her than ever...I get in more trouble for anything I do or say. Now I find that I'm always in trouble and I don't know why. Now that David is gone, I'm afraid that she will try to kill me, like she tried to kill him. I'm afraid that she will treat me like an animal like she did him. I'm afraid that now I'm her IT. The Pelzer family's secret life of fear and abuse was first revealed in Dave Pelzer's inspiring New York Times bestseller, A Child Called "It," followed by The Lost Child and A Man Called Dave. Here, for the first time, Richard Pelzer tells the courageous and moving story of his abusive childhood. From tormenting his brother David to becoming himself the focus of his mother's wrath to his ultimate liberation-here is a horrifying glimpse at what existed behind closed doors in the Pelzer home. Equally important, Richard Pelzer's touching account is a testament to the strength of the human heart and its capacity to triumph over almost unimaginable trauma.