I just finally did my personal statement to apply for an MA... I think it's too long but hey.. I'm bored now

 I want to get to a point where attack is not my best form of defence.

It’s not so much that I wish to do this MA but I feel I the absolute need to.

On January 9th 2013 my life as I knew it changed forever and since then my internet print would be the work of a focus group or a PR company to figure out, how to come out of the oncoming headlights, associated with Mary Moss, me.

Children’s rights

I was born in Chelsea London, Mary Josephine Muriel Moss, from a lineage of royalty, brutality, upper class, middle class and working class, migrant status and a confusion at birth as to this multi-faceted identity that would become me, global.

I’ll start with my Mum’s side. Mary Moss (nee Gavin) was an Ireland born, wonderful Catholic in that she was ever so good and gentle. Her mother before her was a great Mexican born Catholic and her parents were rich Catholic’s beyond belief.

Mum attended church religiously and had all us children, her seven stars as she called us, in best catholic schools, the Sacred Heart in Hammersmith, the Marist Convent and the London Oratory. We were in the choirs always and my sister and I often had solo parts, up at the top of the church by the organ. We held starring roles in school plays.  Our Mum was fun, often smiling, a very pretty woman, fashionable and worked hard as a secretary, to pay the rent, then the mortgage.


My Dad, he was born in Ireland into a 300 acre farm with eight other siblings. He ran away at fifteen and worked as a scaffolder. He elevated to health and safety manager of the barbican and the natural history and science museums.

In the 70’s a culture of misogyny was seen as normal and my Dad, also a looker, taught us to wolf whistle at women.
Faced with health and safety illness, where his ears rang all the time and he seemed to have severe sinus problems, he was always in a mood and very often would be in bed during the day time, getting up at night to go out and take his oldest son an infant Edward with him, into the night. He had a network of friends and family and politics kept them busy.


The family looked great in our house in Parfrey Street W6, always dressed to perfection and beaming in the photo’s.

Socioeconomics and my father’s ill health had brought the family to the attention of Hammersmith Social Services.  

My mother had three young babies after a gap of seven years, after she had had us, four older ones. Young and fit she was having to do some cleaning for her wealthy, Catholic Church going neighbours and the priests to pay the mortgage.

She paid for everything herself as well as looking after her ill husband and all us kids, she a was strong, proud lady.

One day Mum went into her local social services and asked if they could get her some bunk beds, as despite having bought a three bedroom house, the parents had one room, the three older girls had one room, the older boy had his own room and Mum used to sleep on the leather sofa, pull out bed with the three babies as they made too much noise for my Dad. And so it was that an assessment was to be carried out and in walked a social worker, who was also an Irish woman.

The social worker approved the bunk beds and so life became a bit easier for Mum as the youngest girl could be in with the older girls now, four to a room and she only had the two little boy babies to deal with. However the social worker had noticed how well behaved the children all were and found that quite abnormal. She was later to say, “they were like mice”.

So it was not surprising for the social worker, when one day a call came into the area office from the Met police. The second oldest girl, me, 13, had reported with Mum’s support, to have been sexually abused by the father and also Mum reported years of domestic abuse to back up her daughters account, when the police were very nonchalant and even laughed as was the culture in the early eighty’s with things not changing much. The relationship between the parents had actually been based on a series of sexual offences perpetrated by the father whom also had a history of sexual offences.

13 court cases later, all seven children were taken into care for grievous bodily harm and Mum was put in a refuge.

You wonder at this point a few thing;

1. It was her house, albeit his name was jointly on the deeds, why did she and the children have to leave?
2. Why did he not go to jail?
3. Why when she went to meet her husband to get the house back, did social workers pack her bags and send her back?
4. Why were the children moved from their good schools?
5. Why were the children unsupervised much of the time and allowed if not encouraged to drink alcohol in pre-teens?
6. Why did social workers attempt to have the three younger children assisted adopted at £70k per child?
7. Why were the family moved to the seaside with list continuing of psychiatric abuses, in the system to this day?

At sixteen despite being a police cadet, I found myself in a secure unit for six months for taking an unauthorised trip to London with two of my siblings. The children’s home accepted the other two back, after being captured and brutalised by the police for ‘absconding’ but said, “you can keep her”. That’s no way to treat a child and this private children’s home were a couple, who had 13 children in their big house, being paid £700 per week per child. I often complained about them.

Is there any accountability, trust pilot reviews, children’s rights?

At 16 having been in a secure unit for that ‘unauthorised trip’, the net was closing in and my next journey was to prison.
The social worker that had been originally involved in the bunk beds scenario, thought this was a step too far, gave up her job and she took me to her house. I was back in London now and got a second chance to continue with my education.

By May/June 1986 The Certificate of Prevocational Education, was awarded to ‘Mary Jo (Catherine, my catholic confirmation name, later dropped) Moss’, who satisfactorily completed a full-time course of study for The C G L I (City and Guilds of London Institute) FOUNDATION CERTIFICATE (COMMUNITY CARE). 141415/6891/45137.

In 1986/87 and 87/88 I did the Preliminary Course in Social Care, gaining a sociology o-level.

At Christmas 1987 I was stopped from seeing my family by the couple at the children’s home by the sea and I was devastated about it, so the social worker whom I was living with said, “you didn’t hear this from me but there is an organisation called NAYPIC, they might be able to help you” and so I went to see Alison Pollington the London Development Officer but she was late and so I met the other London Development Officer, Carol Cox who was great.

A meeting was organised by NAYPIC with the social services and the children’s home to negotiate me being with my siblings for Christmas. The woman from the couple went mad saying I had “brought down the unions” and so I won and they were actually held to account and a bit scared to be honest, so I learned to power of children’s representation.

In the January following I learned that Carol Cox had died of a brain haemorrhage at only 20 years old.
Since we had spent four hours there and back on a train, I could only remember her words, “join our management committee” and so I did. I was in that NAYPIC office from then on every day.

It became clear to NAYPIC that I was an intellectual. When asked to consult on documents sent to NAYPIC from the Dept of Health and the Home Office, I would be able to have critical analysis and produce in-depth reports back. Then came the Children’s Act 1989 and I lobbied Baroness Faithful for leaving care provision. I learnt another bitter lesson early on there when she voted against her own bill for care leavers as it cost too much money for the Government. I was picked out of a hat to represent NAYPIC at the Canadian Youth In Care Network, that Alison Pollington had helped to set up.

So in July when Carol Cox’s job had been advertised in the Guardian, the voice and social work broadsheets I thought perhaps I should take her job and continue her legacy and so I applied and was interviewed by the landed social work gentry, the children’s legal centre and my peers, a total of 5 people but guess what I got the job and was London Development Officer for the National Association of Young People In Care. And that is how it all happened.

I worked for NAYPIC for 5 years and found the elite adult advisors very stifling. NAYPIC and it’s politic’s of adult control, of what was meant to be a children’s rights movement, run by and for under 25’s, was something I noticed and did not like.

I took to manipulation and I was in a good position to do so and was popular enough too. I started to organise the structure of the organisation to be very representative. We had steering committee meetings where a bunch of us including management committee members would go to Alison’s house in Essex for the weekend and work hard.

The structure was like my own child, I designed it, I wrote a book about it, I organised events to implement it and then I got it.

The National Executive Committee of the National Association of Young People In Care was voted in at conference in Liverpool. Everyone gave speeches and everyone who wanted to say anything formed a queue and took the mic and spoke out about their experiences. I will never forget the morning NAYPIC steering committee all turned up to the venue.

It give’s me so much joy and happiness when I remember the moment we looked into the hall and 350 young people from care were there. We had successfully done it. I decided that this structural change and development to a truly National representation was for me and so I promptly resigned from my paid post at the conference, spoke to be elected by my peers and was successfully elected as the Chair Person of the NEC of National Association of Young People In Care.

I was not tied down doing case work, I was free and I enjoyed it all so much. We met very few months at a hotel somewhere in the country. We set up new offices. We wrote more and more policy and had more and more conferences where the numbers just got bigger and bigger and the adult advisors those ex-DHSS elites were gone for good.

NAYPIC was a force to be reckoned with and a children’s revolution was errupting exposing abuses in the care system.

I was told as a criticism in 2013 that I was like a ‘black power war lord’ but I didn’t mind, I took that really well.

It was all to come to nothing in the end by 1994, and the saddest was profound of how they stopped us and killed some.

The abuses and exposures did not sit well with the powers that be and the abusers and after all they held the purse strings.

I ask myself, were the changes developmental? Was NAYPIC really to be funded by the Government? A government at the time who were also funding the Paedophile Information Exchange, PIE? Was abuse political? Was abuse being perpetrated by some of the elite? Did the elite need the voices of the survivors, through NAYPIC, as close to them as possible? History will show you that it was indeed the case. Hypocrisy was the name of the game and the integrity of ‘children’s right’s’ called into question. This so called war lord could see that from inside the organisation of NAYPIC and I and my management committee were not going to allow friends to be killed for simply doing good and stopping abuse.

However, in these political times when you have hit the toe on the stone, you have to stop and reflect in that grief.
You have to plot.
You have to plan.
And none of that will be seen, for they have hurt you all so badly, that attack is no longer an option when weakened, Neo-liberalism is the name of the game, especially when the foundations of children’s rights are so very, very new.
You accept they have won for now, 1994. “NAYPIC is Dead, Long Live NAYPIC” was the social work headline.

But then came 1999.

As NAYPIC chair apparent who had now been elected at three major conferences, I was asked by my management to continue, unpaid. That took six years, then I managed through personal loans to get a shop, a flower shop, later turned art gallery, as the respectable cover, but its only aim was to get back the offices of NAYPIC downstairs (and store all the paperwork that had been hidden or carried from one place to another), whilst self funding through commerce upstairs.

In 2000 I bought www.youthparliament.co.uk the hybrid of NAYPIC and now we called ourselves NN/YP, New NAYPIC/Youth Parliament.

Our NN/YP name came about because at our last conference in 1993 with 1,100 young people from care in attendance we had voted for a statutory budget by law for all youth in the UK, a nominal amount per child in the UK, which at 12 million UK children and young people, that would make 12 million pounds minimum. No wonder they closed NAYPIC down and withdrew funding. Child abuse was the least of their problems now, an army of dissatisfied youth with an organised structured voice, calling for a Youth Parliament and statutory budget of 12 million, I would say, was their real nightmare.


Just like in the old days, an MP got wind of what we had done, and set up their own, quite quickly it was run by the British Council, so that again ‘adults’ could control it and be close to the abuse exposures, or even at best, not have any, by not having any real case work, just have a mini parliament to discuss the environment and their no-budget, budget.

It was a joke really and still is. Little mini-me children of politicians and well to do people, going to parliament to sit on green chairs and be suited and fluffy and who knows they may even get to become abused again in the highest of places.


I mean our culture has changed but abuse has not and the family courts are closed and we just not aware of abuse.

But that is not for me to say, my job has always been, to be the architect of change through structure. Abusers are not blind though, no matter how much you think you are doing good, evil, which is what abuse is, lurks, and then they make your life hell any way they can, absolutely any way. You don’t think you deserve it, but you are just not seeing that your good, is a danger, so you must be stopped! If they tell the world you are a crook then you are a crook, if they infiltrate your life and stamp on your head, you must just get on with it. Complaining is no good, even solicitors can be paid off.

So, concept, education, and a ‘need’ and ‘want’ has to be created by the majority of the society like all changes.

I said in 2013 my life changed. A member of Parliament set out his stall and said that abuse was in the heart of the establishment, using his parliamentary privilege to do so.

I was about to win a 2 million pounds court case, after successfully setting up two businesses for NN/YP and was going strong in the true sense that the revolution was not being televised and respectability and neoliberalism was my cover.

Why on earth did we have to now go into the quogmire of attack and of abuse stories, yes they were true but why now?

Because as I said, they were more scared of a statutory budget, a youth parliament a bunch of angry youths with a proper voice that was organised. So this brought the structure tumbling down and the rest is history and Mary Moss with it. As on 9th Jan 2013 I was raided for the files of NAYPIC that became operation Fairbank/Fernbridge and now am caught up regularly being abused in one way or another and relentlessly. So I need this MA in Children’s Rights.

My current position is that I am buying a field for www.youthparliament.world I own, www.youthparlament.co.uk wwwyouthparliament.org.uk www.youthparlaiment.uk www.NewNAYPICYouthParliament.com and www.NAYPIC.org and my brother Edward owns www.menatllynil.co.uk and I run www.onepercent4art.com (although the pandemic affected that). My previous shops were www.spaceshift.co.uk and www.scarletmaguire.com and my aim now is to reconstitute NN/YP NEC and hand over the businesses and field and have a global led demand for a youth parliament statutory budget by law, if they don’t ruin or kill me first. All this will happen in 2021. Check out my blogs www.legalaidcuts.blogspot.com and www.youthparliament.blogspot.com all these will have warning notices that your data may be stolen which is a joke!