The thought of going to court makes Carly feel sick. In her 30s, she has been building up to it for years. When she was a child, she was sexually abused, and – after three decades and a breakdown – she finally went to the police last year. “I hid it from everyone until then,” she says when we first speak, a day before she goes to court.
She doesn’t regret her decision – but it has taken its toll. Flashbacks and nightmares from the abuse are vivid and the thought of going through it all in court is “traumatic”.
“It takes everything I have just to get through the days,” she says. However, it’s another “court case”, of sorts – at the hands of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – that has led to Carly not only struggling with her mental health but to keep a roof over her head.
For Carly, the horror of childhood abuse has left a physical as well as psychological mark. “My body’s never been able to cope,” she says. Her adolescence and 20s were filled with ill health – throat infections, bone pain, and mood swings treated with antidepressants. And in 2013, after years of tests and trials (at one point, she had to go on low doses of chemotherapy), she was diagnosed with the rare bone disorder SAPHO. Sometimes the pain is so bad that she cries all night. “Like a knife being stuck in my bone and being twisted,” is how she describes it.
For almost 20 years Carly worked as a nanny. At times, she’d leave a job and then take another because, with memories of the abuse, she gets anxious around men – but by 2014, with the breakdown hitting on top of her physical illness, she finally had to give up work completely and go on the out-of-work benefit, employment and support allowance. She was judged to be so ill that the DWP put her in what it calls the support group: people found to have no chance of being well enough to work.
Money was tight without a wage, but another bit of social security, personal independence payments (PIP), helped Carly get by with an extra £54 a week.
That was until March this year when – just 18 months after being awarded PIP – Carly was told that she had to be tested again. If it wasn’t so grim, it would sound almost efficient: an assessor turned up at Carly’s home, filed a report, and by the end of spring Carly had lost her benefit. DWP rules meant that not only was her PIP stopped but her severe disability component of ESA too: that’s over £110 a week gone in total.
To appeal against the decision, Carly had to attend a tribunal in August. It would be intimidating for anyone to sit in a court in front of strangers on a panel but for Carly, it was devastating – it was the same court that was dealing with the abuse case. When she found she’d been sent back there for her benefit appeal, Carly tells me she “just lost it”. By the time she was at the tribunal, she was shaking and crying uncontrollably. “It was as if I was on trial,” she says.
To add to her anxiety, the medic on the panel was a man, and when he asked questions she couldn’t get words out to answer. “I couldn’t even look at the doctor,” she says. “How could I give an account?”
That night, she had flashback after flashback of the abuse. By the next morning, she’d told the police she was pulling out of the sexual abuse case. “I said, ‘I can’t do this.’” Before deciding to continue with the trial, she was in such distress she was close to being sectioned. “I’d packed bags,” she says. “I don’t know where to. I just packed.”
Listen to Carly’s ordeal and it’s hard not to feel angry: not only about what she’s been through but how entirely pointless it was. Put aside the fact that she had been judged as needing the benefit only 18 months earlier, Carly had told the DWP and tribunal assessment team she was about to go to trial as a vulnerable witness.
Her advocate from Rape Crisis, as well as her GP, had even written to the DWP. As she puts it: “So they knew what was going on, but they still made me go through it.”
When I asked the DWP about the general procedure for such events, it said it was HM Courts and Tribunals Service that decided when and where cases were heard. The DWP said it couldn’t comment further on the tribunal because the matter was confidential.
Unsurprisingly, Carly had her benefit appeal rejected. With more than £100 a week gone, she tells me she’s struggling to pay her mortgage and, in her worst moments, fears bankruptcy. “This abuse … I was proud of making things better.” She pauses. “But now I’m here.”
A few weeks after the trial begins, I get an email from Carly: her abuser has been found not guilty. She’s being strong – she tells me she can at least move on, now the trial is over. But the reality is, Carly’s benefits are still gone.
Carly has thought about trying a “third-tier” tribunal – essentially the last-ditch channel through which to appeal against a benefit decision – but she admits: “I’m not sure I have the energy, to be honest. I’m a strong person. But I haven’t got it in me.”
• Carly is not her real name
