SO, WHO CARES?
Sandra Barwick tells the story of a girl murdered under the eyes of the social services
IT WAS at the age of 15 that Elaine Foley began to run away from home. Home was a neat council flat reached through leafy streets of small Tudor-style houses with patches of stained glass and privet: safe, familiar, British suburbia. Elaine left it for the busy solitude of Heathrow. Again and again the police would bring her back. Again and again, under her parents' in- creasingly desperate questioning, she would refuse to explain her behaviour.
To her parents it was an absolute mys- tery. Until then she had been an unexcep- tional Brent schoolgirl, the youngest of three children, young-looking for her age, naïve, affectionate, confiding, but never in trouble. She had played Elvis records, attended her confirmation classes with an adolescent gravity, had wanted to help people, to work one day as a nurse. And now, overnight, she had changed to a compulsive absconder on whom no argu- ment, no appeal, had any effect.
Mrs Foley, who works as an administra- tor at a brewery company, and her hus- band, an engineer, went to Brent Social Services, 'I thought they were the profes- sionals,' she says. 'I begged for help.'
Elaine went into voluntary 'care'. Brent Social Services were in loco parentis. How much, and what kind of 'care' is not clear, but it took place, over the next year, in a series of children's homes. Mrs Foley and her legal advisers are anxious that they should not be named in case it seems as though they are seeking scapegroats for the event which followed.
One of the homes is the subject of an absolute injunction against publicity be- cause of another matter. She attended four in all, one of them in Wales. Whatever happened inside them (Mrs Foley was not invited to case conferences, so she is not sure) did not appear to help. The first home was mixed, and in Brent. Elaine still preferred Heathrow, to which she con- tinued to run. 'Mum,' she used to say, 'it's clean, it's comfortable, I get space. I feel free.' In this home, as at all she attended, she met new companions, disturbed chil- dren from varied backgrounds. She was the sort of girl, according to Mrs Foley, who wanted to be liked: by nature, a confor- mist. She took to carrying a small pen- knife: she was picked up by the police with it on her.
Her mother continued to beg the 'care' workers for psychiatric intervention. 'I'd tell them, something is wrong,' she says. `She's suffering from severe guilt. She's running away from herself.' Mrs Foley does not know if a psychiatrist ever saw Elaine, but she does know how Elaine's behaviour progressed: worse and worse. After a few months she was placed in a secure unit with a few other girls. Mrs Foley thinks that at this time Elaine felt safer: she seemed to settle down enough to return, eventually, to home and school.
Not for long. Previous events hung over her. The courts bound her over for assault and possession of an offensive weapon her penknife. The story made the local paper. Within hours Elaine had become notorious. 'You stabbed a copper!' said the local kids. On the evening the paper came out she was due to go to a party at her local church. 'She dressed up. She looked so pretty,' says her mother. `She went to it, and then she vanished.'
This time she ran, not to an airport but to another point of departure, Victoria railway station. Back in the full care of Brent, because she had breached the con- ditions of the court, she continued to abscond from their homes to Victoria, joining the dossers and the shifting young who live on the streets. How many nights she slept out is uncertain. Her mother believes that her many clashes with the police from this point — she was arrested 15 times in 12 months — were largely an attempt to get a bed in a cell for the night. In other ways her behaviour hinted that she was not quite as tough as she may have wanted to seem. Every evening, says her mother, she phoned home. Each time she ran away from 'care' she would ring home in case her mother worried. Mrs Foley grew to know the railway station, and the young people who hung out there. Still Mrs Foley asked why she was running away, and got no answer. Still Mrs Foley told Elaine's carers that she thought her daughter needed counselling.
One Friday night in May last year, Elaine rang her mother as usual. Then silence. Elaine was still in the 'care' of Brent Social Services, though she was now 16, and an interim care order was given to allow her home. Mrs Foley says she was against it: she says she knew she could not keep her at home and was desperate for support. Mrs Foley's legal advisers say that Elaine was still in the 'care' of Brent Social Services, though an interim care order had been given to allow her home. Mrs Foley says she knew she could not keep her at home and she was desperate for support. In the silence which had followed the phone call she began to look for her daughter: in Victoria, around the Strand, in the haunts where the 'homeless' gather.
It was the police who found Elaine for the last time. She had been murdered by a 25-year-old vagrant, Akos Mahaily, other- wise known as Roland Street, on Saturday 12 May near Waterloo station. A stranger had heard her last cry for help of the many she had made over that last year of life, at around 10pm. Her killer had a list of convictions for violence: he is now in Broadmoor. The 'care' of Elaine Foley had finally come to an end. It is an inconclusive end, however. There are many questions to which Mrs Foley would like answers. She is not, she says, out for revenge, but she is consumed by a desire that the lessons of her daugh- ter's short life and violent death should not be wasted.
Was Elaine ever given psychiatric help or counselling, and if so, of what kind? Did anyone in `care' ever discover during her life what, after her death, became known: that she had had, at 15, a secret and brief affair with an older man who had then moved on? If so, did they consider telling her mother? Why was she consistently allowed to run away to Victoria?
On what grounds were decisions made not to hold her longer in a secure unit? In short, how can children like Elaine, in and outside Brent, be better served? These questions are not easily answered. No one knows yet how to treat very disturbed children. Even the best, highly expensive therapeutic communities often fail to change them. Some are violent, others arsonists, some, like Elaine, seek continual escape. But unless these difficult questions are examined in public, no answers will ever be found.
A few weeks ago Brent Social Services agreed to hold an inquiry. It will be paid for by Brent, and judged by the National Children's Bureau, an adjudicator chosen by Brent. Mrs Foley hopes that she will be allowed to be heard, and to hear, the evidence at length. The story I have given above is necessarily one-sided, for Brent refuses to talk about the case until the inquiry is held.
`I was naive myself,' says Mrs Foley. `I went for help. I went because otherwise I feared the worst, that she might get in with a bad lot, and end up murdered. And in the end the worst I feared happened.'
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