Warning: This article includes details of sexual assault and child abuse.
Stand-up comedian and writer Corey White has made a living mining his childhood for laughs. But when the Melbourne man spoke about being raised in the foster system on Monday night’s episode of Q&A, there was no punchline.
White, who grew up in Caboolture, Queensland, told the panel that he was in foster care until he was 10 years old and during that time he experienced “rape, physical abuse, sexual abuse, starvation”.
“My mother died of a heroin overdose when I was 10 and I was in one particular foster home that was absolutely horrific,” he said.
When pressed by stand-in host Hamish Macdonald about what happened there, White replied, “All of the bad things. Lots and lots of rapes. I’ve got a PhD in getting raped. The foster mother was absolutely awful.”
White’s comments came on the back of an audience question related to his expressions of support for a scheme to pay drug addicted women to take long-term contraception in order to reduce the number of children ending up in the foster system.
White cited a US charity named Project Prevention that does just that via payments of up to $5000.
“The fact is that a lot of drug-addicted people do have children, and those children are condemned to lives of horror,” White said. “So that’s the context in which that solution is offered. Because all of these middle-class niceties aren’t working.”
When Macdonald noted such a scheme would mean White may never have been born, the comedian responded, “I think it’s a cost I would be willing to pay. A child should not be born into hell, and if we can voluntarily, consensually arrange for people to delay child birth then we should.”
White has previously detailed his tortured upbringing via ABC program Australian Story and documentary series Corey White's Roadmap To Paradise; from his criminal father's domestic violence, to his mother's addiction and his own struggles with crystal methamphetamine.
"My mother was a drug addict; I know that she loathed herself," White recently told The Sydney Morning Herald. "My father was mentally ill and … at what point does free will come into it? Can you really speak of free will when a man stabs his partner with scissors and says 'I'm god, you're the slave' – is that the product of a rational mind?"
Government data from June 2017 revealed that 47,915 children were in out-of-home care in Australia, 38 per cent of which were in foster care.
If you have experienced domestic violence or sexual assault, support is available via 1800 RESPECT. Please call 1800 737 732.
Top Comments
We foster and are now kinship caters to our three. We are what I can quality carers. We go over and above to advocate the needs of our kids, we empower them to speak up and make choices and decisions for their needs in this screwed up system of “child protection”.
For 6 years they’ve been in care. For 6 years their guardian, child safety, has supported detrimental harmful and negative contacts with a bio family who will never change (they have a 26 year history of 9 children in care), and all supervised under the watch of “child safety”. More recently, our kids have realised their contacts are never getting better, never changing for positive, detrimental and harmful for them and they’ve made decisions to scale them back.
However no matter how much they affirm to their kinship family, express their belonging and value is found in this home, they are not being acknowledged in that. It’s damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Bottom line, the system is rubbish. There can be some horrific bio parents, who continue to perpetrate abuse at supervise contacts. Child safety does so much further damage to kids by allowing myriads if strangers through the kids lives causing their already missed up attachment and relationship disorder to be exacerbated, and yes, there are some awful carers out there who should be jailed, no doubt.
BUT there are many many genuine and quality carers who do what we do and value the child. These are the people who will change the system and the child’s life for the better, if cared about, treated with respect and supported.
As a foster carer, I’m horrified that this abuse could have happened to Corey in a home where he was supposed to be safe.
When my husband and I went through the assessment process in NSW last year, it was incredibly thorough and intense, thank goodness. I hope that’s a sign that things have changed (though the murder of Tialeigh Palmer suggests that there’s still a long way to go).
So sorry to hear that the system failed Corey twice.