Pin down : one girl's harrowing and disturbing tale of institutional abuse / Teresa Cooper.

Thrust into care at six months of age because of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, Teresa Cooper's life began in a less than perfect way. But little did she know that things would only go from bad to worse. Teresa spent her unsettled childhood in a variety of children's homes before eventually being sent at the age of thirteen to Kendal House in Gravesend, Kent, which was to become the prison in which her worst nightmares would come true. Even on her first day, Teresa found herself a victim of the terrible 'pin-down' regime; soon she was being injected with dangerously high doses of drugs and then raped and seriously abused. This cruel and vicious treatment, accompanied by punishments such as 163 days spent in solitary confinement, meant that it was not long before Teresa began to harm herself and even attempted to take her life. After three years of hell, Teresa was put into foster care at the age of sixteen. But her new foster father would turn out to be another abuser. Within the first week of being with the foster family, she was so brutally raped that she had to go to hospital to stop internal bleeding. Teresa Cooper has fought back against all the odds, managing to piece together the remnants of her fractured life to begin again. She has three wonderful children, and provides help and support to survivors of abuse.