Forgotten Boys & Broken Men

"You don’t heal from abuse, not really. You manage. You cope. But the scab is always there, waiting to be picked open by memory, silence, or the sound of your own name said the wrong way." This is not a book about recovery. It is a book about truth, consequence, and the lifelong sentence given to children abused in the very systems meant to protect them. Forgotten Boys & Broken Men is the follow-up to the ground-breaking best seller, The Forgotten Boys: A Borstal Legacy. It is a charge sheet against silence, a reckoning with institutional betrayal, and a call for accountability from a man who lived it, survived it, and now works to change it. Lewis Gell, safeguarding specialist, trauma recovery strategist, and former child prisoner, takes readers beyond policy and into the lived reality of those discarded by social care, youth justice, and education systems. Drawing on over three decades of frontline experience, this book exposes the damage, challenges the excuses, and demands that professionals finally listen to the voices they’ve kept out of the room. It features two deeply confronting white papers, written not from a boardroom but from the pain of a boy who was never supposed to speak: Inherited Institutional Abuse: Do Today’s Professionals Understand Their Legacy? The Case for Whole Life Sentences in Sexual Crimes Against Children This book is for professionals, students, reformers, and anyone who dares to ask what really happened to those children. And what’s still happening now. “If you work with victims, this book is for you. If you work inside the system that failed them, this book is about you.”