As I explained in my proposal, my siblings and I went through a large amount of mental abuse which has affected our everyday lives in a number of different ways. One of the things that I feel, is this sense of paranoia, I constantly feel as if I am being watched for everything I do. When I explained this feeling in the tutorial, I was asked if I knew where it came from. I gave this some thought and realise that there are a number of things that may have been the main cause of this.
Firstly, when my sister and I were about 5 and 10, my step dad placed a camera in our room for around a week and the excuse was that my sister had cut the carpet and they needed to keep an eye on her and I never thought of it as being weird as this seemed quite normal to me, until recently when I told my older sister about it and she said that she has similar experiences when she was younger with him and this made me think that he is a bit of a creep, but that idea of there being a camera in our room to ‘keep and eye on us’ has never left my thoughts and has made me constantly paranoid about it.
Secondly, we could be watched and constantly told what we could and could not do and we wouldn't get very badly told off if we did something that my step dad did not like, we were only allowed 1 hot meal a day which we would have at school and then come home to have a sandwich, we weren’t allowed to have a drink without asking, we had to make sure everything was always very clean and tidy, and so from this I have always felt like I have someone watching over me.
Thirdly, when i was around 8 or 9, I developed a very nasty rash on my back due to not being very clean as I was always so worried about having a shower as my step dad would tell us we couldn’t have one if he was going to have one. One day I went to my dads house for the weekend and he noticed the rash, and straight away took me to hospital, at the time I was so young, I had no idea what was going on and to me I didn’t really care about it but apparently it was quite serious. The hospital rang social services as nothing had been done sooner, from this, they had to do a couple of reviews of my home life, and I got the blame for all of it, nobody spoke to me properly for a couple of days, and from this I felt as if I had done something horribly wrong and felt as if everything I did or said was being monitored. I still feel this way now especially when being around “Official” people, just writing this post is making me very nervous as I worry somebody might see it and have a go at me or something similar.
I realise that these words are quite graphic and are explaining a lot about what went on in my childhood, and the last thing I want is for people to feel sorry for me or anything like that, all I wish is for people to understand me. To understand the way I am and that I may be a bit different to other people because of the way that I grew up. This is why I have decided to do this project on surveillance to hopefully show people, without them having to experience it full time, how it is to feel these emotions.