Search results for ""Author Joe Cusack""

On March 2nd, 2019, Yousef Makki, a scholarship pupil at Manchester Grammar school, was stabbed in the heart by one of his friends on a quiet, leafy street in the wealthy Manchester suburb of Hale Barns. The two boys who were with him as the 17-year-old lay dying from a 12cm deep knife wound were brought up in the affluent surrounding areas and like Yousef had attended expensive public schools. But unlike them, Yousef was not from a wealthy family. He grew up seven miles and a world away on a council estate in Burnage and won a life changing bursary to a prestigious grammar school. Just four months after Yousef was killed, a jury found his friend not guilty of murder or manslaughter. The outcome has been widely questioned, raising issues of class, wealth, and privilege in the justice system. Yousef died from a single stab wound to the chest. When his sister, Jade, collected his blood-stained clothes and personal possessions, he had a single pound coin in his pocket. This is Jade's personal story of her brother and how the fight for justice has transformed her life.

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"It was like going through a door which had been locked all my life. I had walked past it every single day, afraid to even rattle the handle. Now I was smashing the locks, I was wrenching it from the hinges, and I was marching through. Here I am!" A woman whose mother twice tried to kill her as a child has won a ground-breaking battle in the supreme courts for the right to claim compensation. Monica Allan’s legal victory set a precedent and has opened the floodgates for others to claim in her wake. Thanks to her 12-year legal fight, other victims now have hope. Other victims now have a voice. In her memoir, Monica, 54, tells the story of her childhood, when her mother, Betty Mount, forced her head under running bathroom taps and tried to strangle her. She had previously tried to kill Monica as a baby. Monica was taken into foster care, where her new parents ran a brutal regime. To the outside world, the family was devoutly religious and respectable, but behind closed doors, Monica was physically and sexually abused. Failed by a second mother figure, she moved into her own home aged 18 and went on to have four children. Monica loved her children but battled constantly with the demons from her past. She carried her dark secrets around with her for 40 years until in 2010, haunted by her trauma, she finally decided to seek justice. She was told she could not seek compensation because of the ‘same roof’ rule, meaning victims who lived with their attackers up to 1979 were ineligible for pay-outs. For the past 12 years Monica has been fighting her case through the Supreme Courts and was recently awarded compensation from CICA in respect of the sexual abuse she suffered in foster care. She is awaiting a second settlement for the attacks by her mother.

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A deadly secret. A horrifying discovery.A daughter tells the devastating true story her mother tried to hide…Growing up in a chaotic home on Merseyside, young Joanne raised herself and her brother and sister, while her mother lapsed into a downward spiral of drinking and casual sex.But the consequences of her mother's messy lifestyle turned out to be far worse than Joanne could ever have imagined.In Silent Sisters, the daughter who was falsely accused of murdering her own baby sister tells the full story for the first time since exposing her mother's crimes.

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For 46 years, Carol Minto has quietly gone about her life, carrying with her the most extraordinary and heartbreaking secrets. Born into poverty and with mostly absent parents, Carol helped to raise her nine siblings. But when she was just 11 years old, her older brother began to sexually abuse her. After four years, Carol managed to escape - and ran away from home. Picked up by social services they place her at Aston Hall in Derby; a psychiatric hospital now infamous for the ghoulish 'truth serum' experiments it carried out on children. Over three years, Carol was stripped, sedated, assaulted and raped by Kenneth Milner, the doctor in charge. Eventually she is released back into the community, aged 18, and has a daughter. But the baby is taken away for adoption and Carol's trauma intensifies.In 2010 Carol finally plucked up the courage to speak out about the abuse she suffered - and received justice, at last. In The Asylum, Carol tells the full story of how she overcame unimaginable suffering, to find the happiness and solace she has today as a mother and grandmother.

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