Posted on 03/16/2003 8:30:03 AM PST by Jakarta ex-pat
Children with faces splattered in ice cream and adults with sunburnt noses smile from the holiday snaps in Annette and Jonathan Blake's kitchen. In the background, two boys, one laughing with a teenage girl, look like part of the happy family scene.
Since the photographs were taken more than six months ago, what Mr Blake can only describe as a poison has seeped through his home.
They were instead two 20-year-old men from a relatively wealthy family in Albania who had convinced the immigration service that they were unaccompanied minors and therefore eligible for statutory social services care.
With more than 3,000 children arriving alone in Britain from wartorn parts of the world every year the demand for reliable, loving foster families has never been greater. The Blakes believed that they could provide the warmth and security a troubled child needed.
Mr Blake, a bishop in the Open Episcopal Church, and his wife, a mother of two small children, wanted to foster out of philanthropic and humanitarian motives. When they received a call from their foster agency about Rifan and Nazmi the story they were told was so moving they found that they could not refuse to take them in.
"They had suffered considerable distress, their homes in Kosovo had been attacked, and the thing that really got to us was that Rifan's mother had been killed and her body had been thrown down a well in his village," said Mr Blake.
When the boys arrived in January last year they became part of a family of six - the Blakes, their toddlers Dominic and Nathan, and Mr Blake's children from a previous marriage, a 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
The couple went out of their way to treat them like their own children. In return they were exploited emotionally and financially.
A family party for their daughter's 16th birthday was ruined when Rifan threw a tantrum, demanding that he be looked after and diverting attention from the girl.
On Mother's Day, Rifan, ostensibly a motherless child, showed signs of trauma for a week, leaving the Blakes embarrassed to celebrate the day. All the time Rifan was attending school, sitting next to 15- and 16-year-old girls none of whom had any idea he was an adult man in his twenties.
As time went on the Blakes began to notice more disturbing behaviour. "Rifan was fairly sexualised in his behaviour," said Mr Blake. "He was sexual with my wife and daughter. We thought at the time, though, that he was a 16-year-old boy, he was fond of my daughter, and it was fairly innocent. But we now know he was trying his damndest to get her into bed.
"He would go into her bedroom in the middle of the night and ask her to come and help him make his bed. She is quite an emotional young girl and she opened up to him. She felt sorry for him and he played on that talking about his dead mother. Thankfully she emerged unscathed. If he had violated my daughter, I would be incredibly angry."
As the months went on Mr Blake and his wife had a vague sense that something was not right in their house.
"They spread this poison in our family. Something was happening but we could not put our finger on it," he said. "We were becoming aware that things were going missing. We buy nappies and things in bulk, and I would go to get a bag of nappies and think, 'Oh two packets have gone'.
"Annette would go to get some baby wipes and see that a pile of 100 had gone. I was being driven insane not knowing what was going on."
That was not to be the last of the stealing. On the family holiday in Majorca, which is caught in the photographs in the Blakes' kitchen, more strange things took place.
Mrs Blake's handbag was stolen on the first day they arrived at the hotel. She lost £200, credit cards and a mobile telephone, on which a £1,500 bill was rung up.
Within days, her sister had lost her switch card - it turned up later, but £2,000 had been withdrawn from her account. The Blakes' son also had his wallet stolen from his room and, returning from a swim, Mr Blake found his wallet in the sand where the boys had been keeping watch over the family's belongings. They had no proof that it was the boys, just an increasing sense of alarm.
Then, towards the end of last year, Rifan became violent and aggressive in the house. "I was frightened of being in the house on my own with them," Mrs Blake said.
"Rifan would stomp around the house, throwing things around, smoking, coming in at 3am and having showers, watching pay-to-view porn on the television in front of the children."
Looking back now, she cannot understand why she did not see through them earlier. "When I saw it, I suddenly saw it all. Rifan was a compulsive liar, a professional conman, who was stealing from us, who was trying to manipulate me."
At the end of last year they finally challenged the boys and they confessed that they were Albanian adults; men with families in Tirana to whom they were sending money. Operating in a network of Albanian men, they were travelling to Margate and Ramsgate to translate for other fraudulent asylum seekers, claiming to be Kosovan refugees entering Britain.
Neither were orphans. Rifan had a brother living in Essex and it was to his home that the hundreds of pounds in nappies, food and wet wipes, stolen from the Blakes, were taken.
Shocked, upset and feeling "violated" the Blakes asked the men to leave and informed the Home Office investigations unit, the social services and the foster agency. "We were concerned that they be stopped from taking more benefits or from duping anyone else," said Mr Blake. Two months on, no one from the authorities has contacted them.
"It leaves us feeling a real sense of frustration at a system that can't manage to overcome such intrinsic flaws and is therefore liable to constant abuse. Meanwhile genuine child asylum seekers are not being helped," he said.
"We feel abandoned, when we really need help, when we need to talk about our feelings, how we feel abused, no one has come anywhere near."
In the past two weeks, however, there has been one call from the foster agency to ask if they would take in another child - a 15-year-old child asylum seeker from Kosovo. This time, they refused.
All the employees of these agencies need to go through a complete background investigation and psycological testing. Those who fail need to be dismissed immediately.
I only hope you are an older, a sadder, but WISER person. This was usually a middle-class person's take on things.
The working class at a low level, however often, in that era could be somewhat cruel, if they felt smug and judgemental. Their little homilies haunt me to this day. Herewith:
There's one born every minute. They must have seen you coming. If you don't look after yourself, 'oo the 'ell will? A music hall song began- "It serves you right, It serves you right, it jolly well serves you right"- How nasty. Working class myself, I would opt for the saying in bold second paragraph. Profit by your mistakes is also a good motto.
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