Warning: This article includes details of sexual assault and child abuse.
Stand-up comedian and writer Corey White has made a living mining his childhood for laughs. But when the Melbourne man spoke about being raised in the foster system on Monday night’s episode of Q&A, there was no punchline.
White, who grew up in Caboolture, Queensland, told the panel that he was in foster care until he was 10 years old and during that time he experienced “rape, physical abuse, sexual abuse, starvation”.
“My mother died of a heroin overdose when I was 10 and I was in one particular foster home that was absolutely horrific,” he said.
When pressed by stand-in host Hamish Macdonald about what happened there, White replied, “All of the bad things. Lots and lots of rapes. I’ve got a PhD in getting raped. The foster mother was absolutely awful.”
Corey White speaks and you can hear a pin drop in the #qanda audience. Politicians should listen. And act.
— Glenn Gibson (@sszinglehead) July 2, 2018
Top Comments
We foster and are now kinship caters to our three. We are what I can quality carers. We go over and above to advocate the needs of our kids, we empower them to speak up and make choices and decisions for their needs in this screwed up system of “child protection”.
For 6 years they’ve been in care. For 6 years their guardian, child safety, has supported detrimental harmful and negative contacts with a bio family who will never change (they have a 26 year history of 9 children in care), and all supervised under the watch of “child safety”. More recently, our kids have realised their contacts are never getting better, never changing for positive, detrimental and harmful for them and they’ve made decisions to scale them back.
However no matter how much they affirm to their kinship family, express their belonging and value is found in this home, they are not being acknowledged in that. It’s damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Bottom line, the system is rubbish. There can be some horrific bio parents, who continue to perpetrate abuse at supervise contacts. Child safety does so much further damage to kids by allowing myriads if strangers through the kids lives causing their already missed up attachment and relationship disorder to be exacerbated, and yes, there are some awful carers out there who should be jailed, no doubt.
BUT there are many many genuine and quality carers who do what we do and value the child. These are the people who will change the system and the child’s life for the better, if cared about, treated with respect and supported.
As a foster carer, I’m horrified that this abuse could have happened to Corey in a home where he was supposed to be safe.
When my husband and I went through the assessment process in NSW last year, it was incredibly thorough and intense, thank goodness. I hope that’s a sign that things have changed (though the murder of Tialeigh Palmer suggests that there’s still a long way to go).
So sorry to hear that the system failed Corey twice.