Collective Grief; Early Deaths of Young People Who Were in Care
It was 1994. I was 24 years old and starting my first ‘proper’ job which was in a Leaving Care Team. I was so excited, so in denial about my own back story and so eager to make a difference. I was given a list of the people that I would be working with except that ‘Darren’ (not his real name) was no longer on the list I was informed, as he had died that weekend. In the 6 years that I worked with that team, two more young people who I worked really closely with also died. I have never forgot them. Ever.
The new review into early deaths of care leavers in England reveals what can only be described of as a national tragedy showing that more than 100 young people died in a single year, with death rates three to four times higher than their peers and suicide rates among young women potentially 15 times higher. What is ‘new’ about this review is that young people previously disappeared into a silent vacuum of emptiness. The statistics are, I would suggest, not new at all.
For those of us who also left care, profoundly isolated, lost and alone, watching this ‘new knowing’ unfold is not just heartbreaking, it is a mirror held up to a system that has normalised abandonment.
The Review
The 2026 independent review examined 112 deaths of care leavers aged 18–24 in 2025 finding:
Profound isolation at the point of leaving care
A dramatic drop-off in support at 18 described as being “cast adrift”
Young people dying in custody, after child removal, during gender transitions, while seeking asylum, through murder and from medical conditions where support simply fell away
36% of deaths likely by suicide, including 24 young women
One-fifth of all deaths occurring at age 18 the time that the system steps back
These findings confirm what many of us have been saying for decades which is that the system’s treatment of those leaving care is not just harmful, it is lethal.
Survivor Guilt
I haven’t previously spoken about such personal feelings but I can’t imagine I’m alone in saying that when we are thrown headlines about the deaths of those leaving care, lurking somewhere deep within is ‘survivor guilt’. This sensation emerges when:
it is a deep recognition that you too lived through the same conditions that killed others
you know that your survival was due to luck, timing or having access to one relationship that didn’t fall away
you see the system framing these deaths as tragic anomalies rather than predictable outcomes of structural neglect
For care-experienced adults, survivor guilt is a relational and political response to witnessing young people die from the very vulnerabilities we once carried and the lives we once lived. What’s the saying? There but for the grace of god go I…
It is also a response to the narrative gap. Society has not yet learned how to mourn care-experienced young people. Their deaths are rarely named, rarely counted and certainly not held in public grief. Survivor guilt fills the silence.
Collective Grief
Collective grief swirls around the posts we’re reading, not only for the young people who died, but for the futures they were never given the chance to live. What the review exposes is not just the scale of loss, but the moral injury carried by everyone who has witnessed the system fail young people in plain sight decade after decade, where grief is a form of truth‑telling and where the demand for change has finally, we hope, become impossible to ignore. If this review teaches anything, it is that survival isn’t meant to be exceptional and that policy must refuse to accept a system that continues to make survival feel like a narrow escape.
A Reasonable Outcome
What we should ensure that we demand from this review is an end to age‑based abandonment. There has to be a national duty of care that extends into adulthood, with relational, practical and therapeutic support that does not evaporate at some arbitrary age. We must demand accountability that is in the form of structural responsibility held by the systems that created the conditions for these deaths. The voices of care‑experienced people, especially those who have lived through the same experiences that ended the lives of others, must be centred in every reform.
There are changes on the way which I have written about here. We can’t really know anymore. We know. Many of us have known for a very long time. The time to do something with that knowing expired a long time ago.
Finally….a review that counts the dead must also protect the living.
