Jackie’s Story: Part 1 – The Challenges of Living Homeless
KEITH: How about you tell me the beginning of your homelessness story? How did you become homeless in the first place?
JACKIE: I first became homeless when I was 16. The household I grew up in was very loving, but my dad had mental health problems. He was a manic depressive. So, growing up, there were a lot of the things I saw, like, my dad self-harming a lot and things like that. At the time, there wasn’t much mental health awareness and so it really, really troubled me, but I just threw myself into doing well at school. But I became really, really depressed myself, and then my dad passed away when I was 13 in what was really traumatic circumstances. When we found him, he’d been dead for, two weeks in the August heat, and so it wasn’t just his death, it was sort of compounded by the awful circumstances.
I was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from what happened, but at the time, I wasn’t aware. After my dad’s death, I just started using drugs and was introduced to heroin at a support group I went to. And it worked. It stopped me worrying about things, I was able to sleep at night. But it quickly became apparent to my mum something was wrong, because I was falling asleep all the time and I was disappearing at all hours. And I wasn’t even trying to hide it properly. My mom discovered paraphernalia in my room and she said to me, ‘you’ve got to stop taking that, or you’re gonna have to leave.’ Which I understood. But, at the time, I didn’t want to stop taking it, because to me, it felt like it was helping. So, I just walked out of the house one day and just basically didn’t come back.
KEITH: Obviously, that’s a really difficult experience and I can see why drugs might feel like a lifeline. So, when you were hungry, what did you do? You probably didn’t know what to do to start with and kind of how did things develop?
JACKIE: There was a woman that I’d met, just on the street when I was doing drugs and I was exceptionally naive. In my adult life, I was diagnosed with autism, and so I wasn’t just naive in the drug sense. I was just naive in general and very trusting. And I met this woman in her 40s who had a daughter who was six. And her being around really lulled me into a sort of a false sense of security, because my mum had always been the best mum ever, and so I thought, all mums are like this. So, this woman said to me, ‘Oh, you know, you can stay with me.’ So, I started sleeping on her sofa, and all I had to do was just give her drugs every day. So, basically, I was just supporting her habit.
At the time, I had a lot of savings because I’d been working from the age of 12. So, I had money, but that soon ran out, especially when I was supporting somebody else’s drug habit as well as my own. One day when I was staying at this woman’s house, she told me that she and her daughter were going out to a birthday party, and she brought this man around to the house. I really didn’t know what was happening until it was much later on down the line. He locked the door once she’d left, and he made it quite clear that she’d arranged for me to sleep with him. And at this point, I’d never had a boyfriend or anything, but, you know, I was 16. And so, yeah, so things got real and pretty quickly. It was really scary, because I’d literally never even had a boyfriend. I’d never even kissed somebody or anything. I was literally that naive. But, after that, I left there and never went back. I just moved straight onto to the street, basically, and went out and just took more drugs.
From then, I just slept on the street, and I thought I had friends in the homeless community. But really, it’s just because I was so easy to sort of take from, really. Just financially, But I sort of understood that it was a bit of a give and take, you know – if I’d brought something for somebody, then they’d look after me or (actually not really look after me), just let me sort of sleep next to them outside.
KEITH: Sounds like there was an awful lot of give from you and not a lot of that you could get back.
JACKIE: Yeah, so at the time we all sort of like, were living behind the swimming pool, because there was a heat vent there. So, I lived there and throughout the day was just using and taking drugs. When I was out on the street, I guess because I was so young, I got a lot of attention from other people, sort of saying, ‘what are you doing here? Why are you here?’ And at that point, because I had just come fresh from living in a house and I didn’t look haggard yet or like someone off the streets. Soon enough, I met somebody, and he was like, ‘Oh, I can offer you a job at this place on Mill Road.’ And there was a house that came with it, because it was a property development place.
So I did get a job there, but it came with a lot of conditions. And at the time, I thought that this man really cared about me and was a friend. But that wasn’t the case. He was 50, and I was only 17. And I never thought at the time, ‘What does somebody that old want from somebody my age?’ But it soon became clear that he was grooming me and taking advantage of me. I wouldn’t say it was abusive, but he had the keys to the house, so he could come and go as he pleased. That place just never felt like home, you know, because I’d be sleeping and he’d just let himself in and just…you know… After a while, I caught on to why I was there and what he wanted and I just went back onto the street.
Things got progressively worse after that, if they weren’t bad enough already. At that time, I’d only been smoking heroin, but then I turned to injecting. And then my habit just got so much worse and I started trying crack as well. And I just told myself, ‘If I’m injecting it, it’s not as bad as smoking it.’ So I started doing that, and after a while I was placed at the DDU (drug dependency unit) on a script. I didn’t want to go for help at first, but I was told by others on the street to go to the doctors. Because then I could get a script for Valium and stuff at the same time – and then, you know, you could take your doses home at the weekend and then sell them.
During that time I met a lot of people that were really entrenched in the street life. And every time I thought that things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Because I’d lived in Cambridge all my life, I didn’t want to beg on the street. Even though I didn’t see a future for myself, I didn’t want to commit a crime. I didn’t want to steal. I didn’t want to put my family through that, I suppose – to be in the local papers. So, the only logical thing I could think of was to go into the sex trade, because that’s what I am. A couple of other people I met did, and I just figured that was the next step. You see, it’s very difficult to talk about, and it’s also difficult not to talk about it. I just don’t remember much of that time because it just went by in a blur. It’s only now that I look back at just how bad the situations I put myself in really were. Like the time I was raped. I always find it hard to talk about, because if I mention being raped, most people often think, ‘Well, how can you be raped if you were going to meet somebody anyways?’ You know? But it’s about different expectations.
KEITH: You weren’t expecting you to be raped. Even though you were voluntarily meeting the person. That wasn’t the expectation. So, it still is rape. Let’s not dress it up.
JACKIE: Yes. It was this man. He abducted me and raped me. It was really, really scary. Afterwards, the police were so nice to me, because after me, this man had abducted and raped three other women. And each time, he had got progressively more violent. That was when I was 20. When I was 21, I had to go to the Crown Court and he got jailed indefinitely. He’s still in jail. Unfortunately, as bad as that experience was, that still didn’t stop me from the pattern I was in. It just didn’t. Because that hold on me for drugs was still so strong. I kept thinking ‘the only person I’m hurting is myself.’ That’s the way I justified it to myself anyway…
Continued in Part 2 of Jackie’s Story: Overcoming the Challenges