Forgotten Mothers UK
General => Articles => Topic started by: RDsmum on May 21, 2025, 04:27:31 PM
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14732429/Jack-adopted-three-drug-family-violence-grief-CATHERINE-TAYLOR-familys-nightmare-final-unimaginable-blow.html#newcomment
I loved Jack whom I adopted aged three. Then his drug-addicted family lured him back and the violence began. Through shattering grief CATHERINE TAYLOR tells her family's nightmare and the final unimaginable blow
By HEATHER MAIN
Published: 01:45, 21 May 2025 | Updated: 01:45, 21 May 2025
Catherine Taylor does not use the swing in the front porch of her picture-perfect cottage in Yorkshire. Made for her by her teenage son Jack, it has become an almost unbearably poignant reminder of a happier time. Catherine, a pharmacist, and her husband Henry, a self-employed builder, haven't seen Jack for almost a year. Their bright 16-year-old whom they adopted at the age of three is living in a flat 50 miles away and working, they suspect, for a so-called County Lines drug-running gang. Tracked down by members of his birth family, Jack was lured away from them, they say, with offers of money and cannabis, to which he quickly became addicted. Most shocking of all, despite Catherine's pleas, she claims that not only have the authorities refused to help her get him back, but social services have actively encouraged Jack to walk away from her loving and secure home. 'It's not just sadness we're feeling, it's intense grief,' she says.
Clearly Catherine and Henry's version of events represents just one side of a highly fraught situation. Yet what they describe is every adoptive parent's worst nightmare a complete breakdown of the adoption itself and the loss of a teenage boy they remain devoted to. Both 48, they found they were unable to have children when they married 20 years ago, and decided to forego IVF treatment in favour of adoption. 'We were desperate for a family, and we knew our love for an adopted child would be just as strong as it was for a child who was biologically ours,' explains Catherine.
Both came from stable homes and knew they could give a child a similar life in their three-bedroom house with a huge garden and good schools nearby. In 2012 they were matched with three-year-old Jack. 'We just fell in love with him,' Catherine recalls. 'We were warned he had been very badly abused by his birth family. Social workers said it was the worst case of neglect they had ever seen.'
When a neighbour raised concerns, she was told, social workers found Jack huddled in a corner 'so motionless and detached' from what was going on around him that they couldn't even get any eye movement from him. He had learned how to physically and mentally detach from danger to the extent he was basically playing dead. 'We were prepared for it to take a long time to form a bond. But from the moment we first met Jack, at his foster carer's house, he instantly took our hands and led us to play on the trampoline. He called us mummy and daddy on the very first day. He just wanted someone to love him.'
Jack quickly formed an especially close bond with Catherine, who gave up her job 'so I could be there for him all the time'. 'When Jack started school, he was anxious about leaving us. At the school gates at pick-up time, I'd see his eyes desperately darting around the playground, scanning to make sure I was there. We arranged for him to have some play therapy and he soon made lots of friends but he remained very close to me. He would only go to sleep if I was holding him, or, when he got older, he'd want to take one of my jumpers to bed to cuddle up to.'
Over time Jack's anxieties calmed and, when he was six, the family was asked whether they would also like to adopt his newborn biological sister Poppy, who was removed from her family shortly after birth. They agreed. Now the family was complete and life for Jack assumed the hectic but happy and above all, ordinary rhythms of school, playdates and holidays. Indeed, the children enjoyed what many would describe as an idyllic upbringing, with trips to Lapland, breaks to the family's holiday home in Wales, sports clubs and, importantly, a loving family. The couple were open with both children about the fact they were adopted but, Catherine says, neither of them ever showed much interest in finding out about their blood relations. The adoption agency had a 'letterbox' system in place, where both parties adoptive parents and biological family could send letters to each other through social services. 'I wrote a couple of times a year with vague updates, letting them know he was doing well at school, and how much he was growing. I hoped they would write too in case Jack wanted to read about them one day, but I didn't get a single letter back. I think he used to be quite angry with them. If I tried to talk about them he would shut me down.'
It was when Jack turned 13 that the family's perfect life started to unravel. On trips into the local town, he began to hang out with a new group of friends, and though at first Catherine and Henry thought little of it, they soon discovered the boys were members of a notorious local family who had already dropped out of school. She and Henry were worried and warned Jack not to be friends with them. Weeks later, however, they discovered Jack had secretly started vaping, after the family dog sniffed out a vape hidden in his room and chewed it to bits. 'It might seem like typical teen behaviour,' says Catherine. 'But given Jack's history, and the fact we knew he was born with addiction issues his mother had been a drug user we were concerned. We talked to him and he promised he wouldn't vape again.'
However, from that moment Jack seemed to go off the rails entirely. First he was caught stealing vapes from a local supermarket, then he began skipping school. He also took to leaving the house at night to see his new 'friends'. 'We were beside ourselves. I felt embarrassed I couldn't control the situation. The school was increasingly worried about his behaviour and, at one point, the headteacher told us to just take Jack out of school for two weeks and go away as a family. We needed to get him away from the situation with the other boys and find the old Jack again. And at our holiday home, it felt as though we did get him back. We went for long walks on the beach, played board games, enjoyed pub lunches it was idyllic.'
But it was not to last. Back home, Jack's behaviour now took a violent turn. 'At school, he'd kick doors in a rage or pull soap dispensers off the wall. Sometimes he'd physically try to attack me. Henry would put himself in-between us and Jack would end up attacking him.'
Once Henry had to go to hospital after being hit over the head with a laptop. 'We were at our wits' end,' Catherine recalls. 'We begged social services for help, but they just offered music therapy. Jack clearly needed more help than that he was dealing with deep-rooted trauma. We talked about moving away, but my husband's business relied on local clients we couldn't afford to leave. Eventually, we found Jack a place at a local private school, and moved him there.'
Despite initially flourishing at the new school, it wasn't long before he was hanging out with the gang again. Now 14, Jack began to break out of home most nights, forcing Henry and Catherine to call the police to report him missing. 'At one point, we were calling the police at least once a week. Each time he disappeared, we were so worried about his safety; once, he left home for six days and we later found out he had been sleeping under a motorway bridge.'
By this time, Jack had also started smoking cannabis. 'We cut off Jack's pocket money so he wouldn't be able to buy drugs,' Catherine says. 'But then he started stealing from us: clothes, credit cards, technology, and running away in the night. Again, I begged social services for help. But their only advice was to consider ourselves lucky he wasn't taking harder drugs. I couldn't believe my ears.'
One night, however, after the most violent outburst the family had ever witnessed, the truth came tumbling out.
After a local broadband outage, the wi-fi cut out, and Jack was unable to control his fury. Blaming his adoptive parents, he flew at Henry, leaving him with two black eyes and footprint-shaped bruises on his torso. A neighbour called the police and Jack was arrested and temporarily placed in a children's home as an emergency measure. 'The police advised us that we needed to press charges this time. At that point, we were at the end of our tether and agreed,' says Catherine. 'Jack was charged with assault and criminal damage.'
On several previous occasions, Catherine had tried to search Jack's social media to see who he was talking to online, but her son had always logged himself out when using the family iPad. The night of the wi-fi outage, however, he hadn't had a chance to do that and what Catherine found made her blood run cold. 'There were photos of Jack sitting smoking with a group and the names seemed familiar. Slowly, the penny dropped this was his birth family.'
In an effort to encourage transparency about a child's origins, today many are given a 'life story book' containing the first names of their blood relations. These were the names Catherine saw dotted across his social media. Now she read through dozens of messages sent to him from his biological family, who it later transpired had found him via the boys he'd been hanging out with in town. '"We just want you back, we'll help get you away from that b***h, your real family will look after you."
It was chilling. 'We had taken his phone away from him but in these pictures, he clearly had other phones we'd never seen before. These were the people who had neglected him so badly as a baby, suddenly wanting him back as a teenager. I felt sick to my stomach.'
Jack was kept in the children's home while Catherine and Henry applied to drop charges against him for attacking his father so he could come back to them but before the application was processed, Jack ran away. 'We got a call saying that Jack had gone to live with his biological grandma. Social services said she was deemed an appropriate guardian because she didn't have a criminal record. Apparently she'd been sending him large amounts of money about £70 every week or so. She was living in a flat with seven other people, all in and out of prison on drugs offences,' claims Catherine. 'And that was where Jack was staying.'
To her horror, now Jack was 16, he was legally allowed to live wherever he wanted and social services did not apparently see any harm in allowing him to stay with his biological grandmother. It seemed to Catherine and Henry very likely that Jack was now dealing drugs himself as part of a County Lines operation, where drugs are transported from one area of the country to another. She later discovered Jack's biological father had died of a drugs overdose and his biological mother was, at that point, in prison. Though social services told her he wouldn't be allowed contact with his birth mum, Catherine discovered he had indeed seen her when she was briefly out of prison. 'It was devastating,' she explains. 'They took my son from me and I couldn't do a thing about it.'
Worryingly, adopted children making contact with their birth families online is on the rise. Sarah Brown, a solicitor who specialises in adoption breakdown proceedings at the Adoption Legal Centre, says social media is playing a bigger role than ever. Children are either choosing to track down their families themselves, or their biological families go looking for them. In the cases we see, it's been a catalyst in the breakdown of the original adoption. We are busier than ever with cases of families who are at their wits' end. Sometimes they are suicidal, or even in fear of their own lives.'
Desperate, Catherine and Henry sought legal advice and applied for mediation with their son through social services, who arranged a meeting with him. 'We sat in a room with a social worker, like a police interview. It was hideous. I was referred to throughout as "Catherine". I wanted to scream: "I'm not Catherine, I'm his mum!" Jack looked and sounded completely different there was no inkling of my son. He used to be quite well-spoken, but now, he looked and spoke like a gangster. I took him a case with his favourite clothes, but he went through it pulling out the designer ones and left the rest in the bag. He started demanding money from me he shouted that we owed him money for his bed, his bike, his PlayStation. It took every fibre in my body to remain calm. I told him we loved him and he was welcome to come home any time. I told him that I felt I had lost my son. "I was never your son to lose," he spat back. That hurt more than anything else. Jack isn't just a child I'd adopted, I'm not his foster carer I love him the same way any mother would love her son.'
Almost 12 months later, Jack is still living with his birth grandmother and has had no further contact with his adoptive family. Social workers told Catherine he was doing so well with his biological family, they have decided to close his case. And in what the Taylors regard as the final insult, should Jack ever ask to see Catherine and Henry, their visit will need to be supervised. When Jack moved out, he made allegations that Henry had attacked him, and although they were investigated by social services and the police and they were cleared of any wrongdoing, the allegation alone means visits cannot now be made without supervision. 'We later found out through speaking to support groups that it's common for adopted children to suddenly make allegations of abuse against adoptive parents once they have made contact with a birth parent,' Catherine says.
'But of course that doesn't make it any less distressing. Neither of us would have ever laid a finger on Jack.'
Official statistics suggest that just over 3 per cent of adoptions break down but campaigners say that's an underestimate. Catherine says she was told their son 'successfully' reuniting with his birth family would not be recorded as an adoption breakdown or disruption. 'It has absolutely broken us,' she says. 'Our daughter is only ten, but she is so angry with him. She also can't understand why the family want Jack back but have no interest in her. She's grieving the loss of him, too. The pain catches me off-guard at the most peculiar times. Recently, we went away and walked to the local pub for lunch. Poppy and Henry would always walk together and Jack and I would walk behind them that's always the way it was. But suddenly, I realised I was walking alone Jack just isn't there any more. And my biggest fear is that he never will be. We'll never get him back.'
All names have been changed.
If you have an experience of adoption you'd like to share with readers, please email: femailreaders@dailymail.co.uk