Offaly.Though the home was dysfunctional and all the children suffered at the hands of their parents, Kenneth and Patrick were singled out for horrific abuse at the hands of their mother.Starved, beaten and sent out to steal, their story is a catalogue of abuse. It also implicates the authorities, who had pages upon pages of reports on their situation, and yet never stepped in.

    Three-year-old Kevin was the victim, betrayed by the parents who should have protected him.This isn't a nice story. It's not a novel. It's raw and told in actual diary entries. Day by day and month by month, the author describes what she heard, what she saw, and how she tried to get help for little Kevin. This is a true story of child abuse, and it describes real events in the state of New Hampshire during 2011 and 2012. It's a harsh plea for child abuse awareness.

    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.

    He is released back into the world without any support or counselling from the authorities.The child abuse and numerous court cases had almost destroyed him, and Stuart became reliant on drugs and alcohol. With his life spiralling out of control, Stuart attempts suicide a number of times. The last try leaving the doctors that resuscitated him incredulous he had survived.At the point of no-return, Stuart was sent to an hospital in the Scottish highlands to fight the demons that assailed him and rebuild his life. This is the remarkable story of his fight to be his own man.

    Then, aged fourteen, she was groomed by the father of a schoolfriend, a local businessman who seemed to love her. She ran away from home to be with him. Pregnant at sixteen, and rejected by her parents, she ended up marrying him. For years, Dawn suffered psychological abuse from her husband, who belittled and threatened her. She was also forced to work all hours in the bars he owned and realized she was good at business - better than him. As her confidence grew, she found the strength to tell the police about her brother. Gradually, Dawn realized she was more than an abused wife - she was a survivor. When she fell in love with a genuinely good man, she hatched a dangerous plan to free herself from her husband and take the thing he cared about most - his money.

    After years of fear and isolation, Heidi knew she had to go to the police. For a long time, Chloe resented Heidi for forcing her to disclose what had happened when she wasn’t ready, while their brother, Tom, couldn’t understand how he had so misjudged his father, and at first he didn’t believe their tale. The truth threatened to destroy them all. This is the very honest story of three siblings, and how a man they trusted threatened to tear their family apart.

     Life was never easy for little Siobhan. Born with cerebral palsy, she already has extra difficulties to contend with. But her disability isn’t her only problem. For Siobhan, life is a nightmare of constant verbal and physical attacks. The verbal and physical abuse soon turns more serious, even violent. And Siobhan plunges deeper into a relentless hell of daily attacks. As the abuse escalates, Siobhan begins to fear for her life. The urge for survival takes over and Siobhan must take drastic and extreme action to escape the torment. But her safety is short lived and the abuse returns once again to her life. And this time, it is worse than ever. The story builds to a powerful crescendo, and one final, shocking act of sexual violence changes the lives of all concerned for ever. Kate Skylark has previously co-authored two child abuse memoirs. But now, it’s time for Kate to tell her own story. Ugly Child, is the touching and shocking account of the author’s own childhood bullying and sexual abuse hell. Kate Skylark’s real name is Siobhan. This is her horrendous story… The author believes no child should ever have to undergo such torment. So for every book sold, a donation will be made to the NSPCC.

    When, aged 13, his father brought a charge against him in order to remove him from the family home, John found himself in Juvenile Court – from here he was sent to the notorious St. Vincent’s school, run by a group of Catholic Irish Brothers.Beatings and abuse were a part of daily life – both from John’s fellow pupils, but also from the brothers, all of which was overseen by the sadistic headmaster, Brother De Montfort. Tormented physically and sexually by one boy in particular, and by the Brothers in general, John quickly learnt to survive but at the cost of the loss of his childhood.Please don’t make me go, tells in heart-rending detail the day-to-day lives of John and the other boys – the beatings, the weapons fashioned from toilet chains and stones, the loneliness – but we also see the development of John’s love of reading, his growing friendship with Father Delaney and his best friend, Bernard, and his unstinting love for his mother whom he feared was suffering at the hands of his violent father.A painfully, brutally honest account, Please don’t make me go is also an example of the resilience of the human spirit as it documents how John learnt to survive and come through his ordeal.

    There they were to suffer brutal beatings and little care or love – they survived as best they could, looking out for each other, until the terrible morning when Terry couldn’t wake Dennis.In a time when the country was united by war and struggle, the case shocked the nation and made headlines around the world. Terry, a small figure in the courtroom, captured the hearts of mothers and families everywhere, and the public outcry against the foster services led to the instigation of the first provisions to protect other vulnerable children from neglect and cruelty.

    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.

    He was a seemingly respectable businessman from Canada, so attentive and caring it was easy to ignore the warning signs - until he started, step by step, to take over her life. Six months after they first met Al Amin's web of lies started to unravel and Alison became aware that he had a sinister dark side. When she tried to end the relationship, the unthinkable happened and she found herself the victim of an escalating campaign of terror. Even when Al Amin was found with knives and guns, the police had no powers to detain him. Nobody could have imagined the events that were to follow, as Alison was left fearing for her life. It would take all her strength to survive. Brave and gripping, Stalked tells of one young woman's fight against the man who terrorized her, and her determination to defeat the fear and live a normal life.

    I had been looking for sweets. I put my hand in the bag and felt a sticky liquid on my fingers, then I looked at it. A red smear. Then I looked in the bag: bloody knives and clothes. It didn't feel good. What did it mean? I don't know. There are no answers; I daren't ask the questions'Growing up in poverty in London's East End, Kathy was eight years old when her father forced her mother into prostitution. When their mother fled, leaving Kathy and her sisters behind, the girls stuck fiercely together while being passed from children's homes to boarding schools. Then, on a rare trip home, Kathy looked out the window to see a man firing four shots into a Rolls-Royce. It took several seconds for her to realise the victim was her mother's lover, and the gunman was her father.Kathy began her haunting memoir when, as an adult, she travelled back to London, to find out who her gangster father really was. A compelling memoir of an extraordinary childhood, Dance for your Daddy is a true story of the effects on one family of poverty and affluence, violence and love.

    Seven men, all from the town’s Pakistani heritage community, were jailed for selling vulnerable young girls for sex. The convictions made national news, but for one girl the chilling headlines were all too real.      Holly Archer was just fourteen when her life changed forever after becoming embroiled in a frightening web of exploitation and abuse. Enduring countless violent rapes and death threats, she was forced to sleep with several men a night. As her abusers’ grip tightened, she fell into despair, twice becoming pregnant. Hours after her last GCSE exam, she took an overdose in a desperate attempt to end the nightmare that had become her life.      Her escape eventually came when, old enough to leave home, she fled to Birmingham. She moved house every six months, fearing her abusers would hunt her down. She eventually found the strength to return to Telford shortly after giving birth to a daughter, around the same time the police launched an investigation into the exploitation of young girls in the town. She underwent hours of rigorous police interviews but in the end decided she could not face her abusers in court.      Nonetheless, seven men were convicted of sex offences and jailed as a result of the investigation. Holly slowly began to pick up the pieces of her life and was given a job with a rape prevention charity. Having survived her ordeal, she now tells her full, shocking story for the first time.

    This is one woman's story of all she lost and how hard she fought to survive.A teenager in the 1970s, Gwen Wilson grew up in Western Sydney. It was a tough childhood. Illegitimate, fatherless - her mother in and out of psychiatric hospitals; it would have been easy for anyone to despair and give up. Yet Gwen had hope. Despite it all, she was a good student, fighting hard for a scholarship and a brighter future.Then she met Colin. Someone to love who would love her back. But that short-lived love wasn't the sanctuary Gwen was looking for. It was the start of a living hell. Rape was just the beginning. By sixteen she was pregnant, her education abandoned. Australian society did not tolerate single mothers; prejudice and discrimination followed her everywhere. In an effort to save her son, Jason, from the illegitimacy and deprivation she'd grown up with, Gwen chose to marry Colin - and too quickly the nightmare of physical abuse, poverty and homelessness seemed inescapable.In 1974, in the dying days of the forced adoption era in Australia, this isolated teenager was compelled to make a decision about her child that would tear her life apart, one she would never truly come to terms with.I Belong to No One is one woman's story of all she lost and how hard she fought to survive and eventually triumph.

    Two loving parents, a backdrop of 1960’s Britain; life had provided for her, at least with the riches of modesty.Keri herself however, would often confound teachers with her erratic behaviour, which was at best sullen and withdrawn; at worst violently disruptive. When challenged, she would only exacerbate her growing reputation as a fantasist; weaving terrible tales about the “abuse” she was suffering at the hands of her very creators.But it was the much-celebrated age of innocence; the childhood of our modern culture. Big brother had not yet been born and Nanny was only looking out for her dearest, as opposed to the entire State. Who would take the word of child on such matters? After all, she was just a bad egg… wasn’t she?Well, no. She wasn’t. She was indeed, for over a decade, the victim of an abuse so staggering that merely to read about it is enough to freeze even the thickest of blood. “Keri” is the story of what happens when truth is imprisoned in a little glass jar and buried deep within the Earth, condemned to a sentence of eternal silence. For truth may be repressed, but never supressed. It will always find light eventually. And, in this gut-wrenching account of her early life, author Kat Ward takes the reader through every shade of darkness, whilst never allowing the candle of hope to fully extinguish, so as that truth may indeed find its rightful freedom.