He was shocked to see that very little had changed since his time in care and that kids were still being failed by the system. "I had an epiphany,” he tells me. “The dark part of my life that I had kept hidden from friends and family came rushing back when I went to the care homes. Kids were still being failed, not so much in terms of physical abuse, but being neglected and denied counseling. There was so much red tape and paperwork that came before the children."
Chris is angered by the short sightedness of budget cuts and lack of funding. “If you do a survey of adult criminals, you’ll find many have been in care and have been failed by the system. If the government invested in the root of our society, we could stop some criminals in their tracks. It takes much more funding to put an adult in prison.”
Chris could not stay in a system that was failing young people, although he works tireless to campaign and help them. It was his work with young people that led Chris to write about his own, and others, stories. Initially, he had no idea where he was going with it, but found the process therapeutic and helped with his own battle against mental illness brought on by his childhood trauma.
He decided to track down the boy that had been in the bed next to him. He managed to trace him but, sadly, discovered that he had taken his own life. It was this and the stories of so many he met along the way in care that made him write Damages in the hope that Britain's forgotten children could have a voice, and to show that we must take action now.
As he talks to me, Chris puts his hands to his head and suddenly the funny, energetic man is gone. “Why not me?" he says, with such a desperate look. Clearly, his experiences in the care system in the 1990s have left a huge mark, despite his strength and energy.
The question he asks is one he has asked himself every day of his life – why did the monster not take him? He recalls that some of the kids would go to bed one night in a care home in one city and wake in another part of the country, where they had been pimped out by their abusers.
Chris Wild lost his dad aged 11, leaving him to grow up in the care system. There, he witnessed the incessant physical and sexual abuse of children, with the only escape leading to the streets. So many others like him, failed by the systems put in place to protect them, ended up with nothing but drink, drugs, prostitution and crime as their normality.
So many children were groomed and placed where they could be abused because they looked easy targets. Chris was Wild by name, and by nature, and he believes the fact that he would have fought back might have stopped them.
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