When Lucy and I meet in the food court at the Arndale Centre in Manchester, it is the first time I have seen her for 15 years. But we were close growing up. We both lived in a children’s home in Chadderton, near Oldham, where I described her to everyone as my sister. The last time I saw her, she was being taken to a different care unit after giving birth to her first child at the age of 14. I later learned that she was made to give up the baby for adoption.

Now 29, Lucy has had four more children, who still live with her. When we meet, she is accompanied by her four-year-old son. Despite mental health problems, including bipolar disorder, she is coping well and is a good parent: all her children are in full-time education and well looked after. “I want to make sure that my kids have a better life than we had,” she says.

When I decided to track down the people with whom I was in care, I did so with reservations. The very fact that I entered the care system is a painful subject for my immediate family, especially my mother, who says she won’t read this story. Whatever I write, she believes, people will say it was because of her failure as a parent that I ended up in care at the age of 12.

But for me it has always been more complicated. There are many reasons families break down and children go into care. It is not always down to abuse or neglect. I want to stress that I don’t blame my parents. I was a troubled child; the psychiatrist who diagnosed me with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) when I was six said I was one of the most severe cases he had ever seen. I had dramatic mood swings and a violent temper. I was also extremely hyperactive and didn’t really sleep. My parents, who had problems of their own, were not equipped to cope.

I wanted to tell this story because life is difficult and distressing for many people who have been in care. An estimated 74,000 of us are homeless, while young people who have been in care are six times more likely to enter the criminal justice system than those who have not. I was sure that a lot of the children I grew up with during my five years in the system would have had similar experiences.

I also hoped to hear some success stories. But I have since learned that almost everyone has been in trouble with the police, had stints in prison or struggled with drugs and alcohol. Almost all the girls had had children before or around their 18th birthday.

The first placement I was sent to was a foster home in Longsight, central Manchester, when I was 12. Before this, I had spent two years in a residential unit attached to Rossendale school, a special school near Rochdale for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, but I returned home at weekends and holidays.

The fact that I was in care did not register at first. The place in Longsight was a normal family home and the first few weeks were fascinating. The city was very different from Oldham, where I had lived before, and I was captivated by its faster pace. The family I lived with was also interesting. The woman who fostered me was in her early 50s and white; her husband was a slightly older man from Jamaica. I was introduced to 70s reggae and taught to make West Indian cuisine, including fried dumplings, rice and peas. But the placement fell apart when I got in trouble with some other kids from the estate. I would also regularly abscond to my grandmother’s and ignore the curfew I had been given.

From Longsight I moved to another foster placement, followed by two children’s homes. It was in the homes that the separation from my family hit me. I saw less of my younger brother and infant sister, who was born when I was in Longsight. The children’s home in Chadderton was a huge red-brick building; the bars on the windows and the almost sterile interior made it clear that this was an institution.

“This place will either make you or break you,” said the staff member who took me to my room. He then supervised me while I unpacked, checking that I had not brought in drugs or weapons. That night, I heard the other children returning home late and shouting abuse at the staff for not letting them into the kitchen; after they made their way upstairs, they carried on yelling into the early hours. For the first few nights, I cried into my pillow. I even moved my bed against the door, scared someone might try to break in.

But, as the months rolled by, I got used to the home and started to bond with the others. I got on with Andrew, whom I first met while he was stoned in the kitchen. He was laughing hysterically into a bowl of Coco Pops. There was John, with whom I used to play tig around Chadderton, including in the local B&Q, from which we were banned on more than one occasion. Graham loved trouble and enjoyed nothing more than roping me into his schemes. Georgina, two years older than most of us, was generally aloof – unless you got on her bad side.

Finding them a decade and a half later has been very difficult. Like me, many of the people I met during my years in care moved between placements, sometimes beyond Greater Manchester. In some cases, the last time I saw them, they were getting into a police van. During my time in Longsight, the family fostered another boy. The last I heard, he was being treated for an overdose.

When I left care aged 17, Facebook did not exist and I could not afford a mobile phone. Over the years, I bumped into my fellow care-leavers occasionally in the town centre or on public transport, but we did not keep in touch. Many have experienced tragedies that they don’t want to be reminded of. Others have changed their names, often after getting in trouble with local gangs or drug dealers. Most of us have struggled to settle down: at 30, I have had 23 addresses.

One person who proved impossible to locate was Luis. The two of us were inseparable when we were younger; neither had a school or college to go to, since I had been expelled from Rossendale and he had passed school-leaving age. So, we would wander around town, begging for cigarettes and getting into trouble with shopkeepers and security guards. I suspect one of the reasons he was impossible to track down is that I did not know his real name. Friends of his who we bumped into back then would call him Leo, Manuel or sometimes just Portugal. Portuguese by birth, he seemed older than the rest of us and once confessed that he was older than we thought. Looking back, picturing his bulging biceps and facial hair, I think Luis might even have been in his early 20s. He may have been lying about his age so he could stay in care; he had nowhere else to go and care-leavers were expected to fend for themselves after turning 18.

The story of why Luis came to the UK and ended up in care was vague and some of his stories would have made Walter Mitty roll his eyes. One particularly absurd yarn was that he was a sniper, on the run from the Portuguese police after shooting one of them in a notorious Algarve slum.

When our paths crossed over the years, Luis would usually inform me of his latest scam. He told me, for instance, that he had invested in a candle company, hollowing out the candles to smuggle drugs into the country; this was making him thousands, he said. Then he would ask to borrow a tenner. I later found out that he was indeed selling drugs, but for a local dealer, receiving only a few bags of skunk for his troubles. A mutual friend recently told me Luis was in prison for drug dealing; without knowing his real name, that has proved impossible to verify.

Kieran, a boy I lived with briefly in Chadderton, was equally elusive. After he left that home, we met again at Hawthorn Crescent in Oldham, a “semi-independent unit” designed to prepare older children for life after care. He was known to staff there as Tom. He only stayed at the unit briefly; he would run away to the notoriously rough Limeside estate, known to locals as “Crimeside”. I last saw Kieran/Tom when he appeared on the TV programme Amir Khan’s Angry Young Men in 2007, in which Khan worked with troubled youths to place them on the straight and narrow through “boxing and faith”. Now going by another name, he talked about his violent upbringing and a recent stint in prison for stealing a car.

Of the roughly 25 people I grew up with in care, I managed to track down only a handful. Luke said he would talk to me, but he wanted to be paid “for the trouble”. Luke was always trying to make cash out of someone. He was reclusive when we were growing up and seldom ventured out of the unit, but because of a learning difficulty he had a bus pass that allowed him to travel for free. He would hire this out to other kids at half the price of a weekly pass. I told Luke that I could not pay him for an interview, but that I would happily buy him lunch; he did not get back to me. I gathered from our brief chats online and his Facebook posts that he had just left a drug treatment centre.

Lucy was the only one who agreed to talk on the record. When we meet, it is slightly awkward at first, but then we start reminiscing about the trouble we got into and it is as though no time has passed at all. “Some of the staff were horrible, but we were little bastards, to be fair,” she says, giggling. She recalls the time when we removed all our furniture from our bedrooms and threw it down the stairs.

Then there was the evening when Lucy’s boyfriend visited the unit and passed around a gun he had brought with him. The gun’s barrel was soldered shut, but it looked dangerous enough that when we waved it around the staff dialled 999. By the time the armed police arrived, Lucy’s boyfriend and another boy at the unit had viciously assaulted the two male members of staff on duty. We did not hang around; Lucy went missing for three weeks.

She is reluctant to go into detail about her life after care: “I don’t like to think about it that much. It just makes me depressed.” But we stay in touch and over the next year she gradually opens up. Did she receive enough support when she was in care, I ask her. Was enough done to protect her? The boyfriend with the gun was in his 20s and Lucy was only 14. She feels the staff at Chadderton should have done more to stop her seeing him.

She tells me that her boyfriend would take her out in his car and, although she was never coerced into having sex with other men, there were a lot of other young girls who were seeing men far older than them. “We used to go chilling in this guy’s shop and they had a bed in the back of the shop where they used to chill with loads of young girls.” Were they being trafficked? She does not know. “It was normal for us. We thought it was fun; we thought they were our friends. They’d take us out in their cars and buy us drinks …”

Were the staff at our home aware of any of this? “They saw me get into taxis and other men’s cars, but they didn’t do anything. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I shouldn’t have been allowed out. I was just a kid. They took me off my mum because they said she couldn’t take care of me, so they should’ve taken care of me. But they didn’t.”

The Rochdale sexual abuse scandal did not surprise either of us.

Lucy says the support did not improve much when she left care, even when she was looking after two younger brothers. I share her disillusionment. At one children’s home, most of the staff had a casual attitude to us attending school. We were never prompted to take care of our personal hygiene and they tolerated children smoking and drinking. Crisps, instant noodles and plates of biscuits were often our only meals. The homes I lived in were mixed, and the staff’s casual attitude to our welfare included our sexual health. Many of the girls I grew up with became pregnant, sometimes by other boys in the unit. I lost my virginity to a girl I was living with when I was 14.

Not all of the staff were negligent. One of my old care workers, Anne, was adored by most of the kids; we felt she was one of the few staff who genuinely cared about us. Some of the others, she agrees when I speak to her, should never have worked with kids. “I gave the job up because of the staff I worked with. Too many of them saw how little they were making, so they came in and went home and that was it.”

Anne says she witnessed staff “winding up children” and that there was physical abuse in the home where she worked. “I remember once I was there with two male members of staff and this lad was kicking off. They sat on his chest, and I’m thinking: ‘My God – this lad is going to die if they don’t get off him.’”

She was later interviewed about it by the manager. “They said: ‘Are you sure it was his chest? Are you sure it wasn’t his stomach?’ And I told them that they shouldn’t have even sat on his bleeding stomach. I felt as if I was in the wrong because I was complaining,” she says.

When I turned 17, I was moved on from Hawthorn Crescent into a place of my own, a two-up-two-down terrace in Oldham. A private care management provider had taken over my case and I was assigned a key worker to visit me a couple of times a week. I had lived in homes or foster placements since I was 12. Although these could be chaotic, sometimes frightening places, the presence of other people was comforting, especially at night. I went from this to living on my own and I don’t think I was ready.

A semi-independent unit such as Hawthorn Crescent is meant to prepare you for life outside the system. It can teach you to manage bills, cook meals and budget. What it can’t prepare you for is loneliness. Before this, I had lived at 11 addresses, attended six schools and left education when I was 15, after being expelled. This is not the best way to build a strong support network. I felt the need to plug the loneliness and my new home rapidly became a doss house where other kids from the estate could drink, smoke weed and act out away from adults. Like many care leavers, I drank heavily while living alone and had regular panic attacks so severe that I often called for an ambulance. Later, in my 20s, I experienced homelessness and long periods of unemployment.

Many of the mistakes I have made are my own and many of them were avoidable, but I can’t help feeling that I would have had more of a chance if I had received better support when I left the care system. Lucy agrees. “We were just thrown in at the deep end,” she says.

In 2013, the government extended the age at which a child could remain with foster carers to 21, but that change did not extend to children living in children’s homes, who still have to leave at 18. Ian Dickson, a care leaver, a retired Ofsted inspector and one of the founders of the campaign group Every Child Leaving Care Matters, believes the deadline should have been extended for everyone in care. “Kids should have the chance to stay put if they want to,” he says. “One of the first and key things the government needs to do is to listen to the people who have been there.”

If a child is taken into care, it is usually because their family is incapable of looking after them. It is not a child’s fault if they have been neglected or abused, if their parents have died or if their family has broken down. The average age for children leaving home in the UK is 22 and most people receive long-term support from their parents, so why should care leavers be treated differently?

The fact that I have lost contact, irrevocably, with so many of the people with whom I grew up tells me we are not doing enough to ensure the future of care leavers. People who feel loved and cared for, who are full members of society, do not simply drop off the map.

“There’s a whole range of people who are successful care leavers,” Dickson says. “When you sit down and talk to them about why they made it, it always comes down to: someone, somewhere believed in them.”

I guess no one believed in Andrew, Kieran, Luis, Graham or Georgina.

• Some names in this article have been changed.