In this TED Talk, poet and playwright Lemn Sissay tells his story of growing up in foster care in the UK. His mother had immigrated to the UK from Ethiopia in the late 1960s and became pregnant. At the time, Sissay says, unmarried women who became pregnant were treated as a threat to the community, were separated from their families, and put into mother and baby homes where adoptive parents would be lined up right away. Mothers, at their most vulnerable moments, would be convinced to sign adoption papers releasing their children to the state and the babies would be given up for adoption.
Sissay’s mother was sent to a “mother and baby home” was encouraged to put her infant son into care. Her plan, he says, was only to put her son into care temporarily while she completed her studies. But the social worker, says Sissay, had other plans. The social worker found foster parents for the baby, to whom he had given the name ‘Norman,’ and told them to treat it as an adoption, as though Norman was their child. He grew up in this family for 11 years, where he was taught to hate his mother for refusing to sign the adoption papers.
After 11 years, Norman’s foster parents returned Norman to his social worker and to the state and Norman left the only family he had known. During the next four or five years, he was held at 4 children’s homes. At the age of 15, Norman began to rebel, for which he was incarcerated for a year in an “assessment center,” which Sissay describes as a “virtual prison for young people.” And because he had no family to inquire about him, the center had no accountability and continually mistreated him. After he left the center, he found solace in creativity and poetry and was able to find his birth family. Sissay ends his TED Talk by saying “You can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child. I don’t mean ‘children,’ I mean a child of the state.”