Vicky Foxcroft shares experiences of domestic and sexual abuse in childhood

Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people Vicky Foxcroft has shared her experiences of domestic and sexual abuse during her childhood in an interview with Gloria de Piero on GB News today.

Describing her background as “fairly tough”, the opposition frontbencher and Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford said: “I spent a large amount of our childhood moving about quite a lot, it made it hard to get a decent education. My mum suffered a lot of domestic abuse when we were younger and that’s part of the reason we had to move about so much.”

She added: “Sometimes domestic abuse is unfortunately also with sexual abuse. Sometimes, me and my sister were subject to that when we were younger.

“You’re too scared to say anything that’s happening to you in life because your mum’s also being beaten up and you don’t know what will happen if you go and raise things that have gone and happened in your life.”

Of the perpetrator, the MP said: “He’s dead now. He had quite a brutal death. I have to say when we got interviewed by the police because of this, because we’re obviously an interested party, I felt really bad because I was so happy he died. I don’t often feel like that in my life.”

She explained: “I was like, he’s had a pretty brutal death and it makes me feel guilty that I feel happy about that. But when we were younger and everything got reported to the police, we got taken to a safe house. Me and my sister were separated from each other and it was awful. They had to separate us but for my sister she really didn’t understand it. She thought I was abandoning her.”

Foxcroft told former parliamentary colleague Gloria de Piero that “nothing happened with it” after they gave information about the abuse to the police in the safe house, when she was around 12 years old, and “afterwards we didn’t have anywhere to live”.

The shadow minister said that although she did not get any As to Cs in her GCSEs, she did go to college and later studied drama and business at university. She also got pregnant at 16, but lost her baby after just five days.

“I was pregnant. I had a baby girl, Veronica. I lost my baby girl because of a complicated labour,” Foxcroft said. She said the complications, which led to the baby having severe brain damage, were related to “the hospital trust and the machinery that was there”.

“Everything that happened to me and my sister happened worse to my sister. I always feel so guilty about that,” the MP said, adding that “there was a bit of me really knowing that things were wrong”. She clarified that the perpetrator was not her biological father.

Foxcroft delivered a moving and emotional speech in the House of Commons in 2016 about the loss of her daughter. She has never talked about witnessing and experiencing domestic and sexual abuse as a child until now.