Shattered Lives

Children Who Live with Courage and Dignity

Camila Batmanghelidjh

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781846422546
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Travail social

*Shortlisted for the Young Minds Book Prize 2006*

Shattered Lives bears witness to the lives of children who have experienced abuse and neglect, and highlights the effects of early traumatic episodes. Chapters take the form of letters to a child capturing their life experiences, hugely impacted by sexual abuse, parental substance misuse and loss, leading to feelings of shame, rejection and worthlessness. Batmanghelidjh offers understanding for those baffled by these hard-to-reach children and warns against stigmatizing them for their problem behaviour. In her critique of existing structures, she exposes the plight of children who are overlooked by the authorities and denounces those who value bureaucracy over the welfare of the individual child. Society's failure to acknowledge the truth of their experiences and act to change the environment in which such mistreatment can flourish is, she strongly argues, leading to the death of childhood. The book is a clarion call for change.

CHAPTER 1

The Witnessing

THROUGHOUT MY LIFE I have worked with vulnerable children. It began when I was nine years old. I used to look after between seventy and ninety children in a nursery in Iran for an hour and a half, while their teachers went to lunch. Looking back, I now realize I had an exceptional gift. But then, my intensive interest in childhood and children seemed normal. I asked my mother to become a member of the Child Development Association, as they would not accept membership from children. The association produced a child development journal; it used to come every Wednesday and I would climb into bed, trying to read it. There was so much I didn’t understand, yet I seemed to have been born with a profound knowing.

By the age of fourteen, while at boarding school in England, I had written the model for Kids Company’s Arches day centre. I knew that one day this plan would be realized. As children, my brothers used to tease me about my vocation, calling me “Mother Teresa” was intended to be a humorous insult. Yet my younger brother has helped me all the way, knowing I am only living out my destiny. During school holidays I worked in nurseries and by seventeen, I had met a fantastic group of children living in wealthy houses of Kensington, Chelsea and Knightsbridge. They taught me much of what I have learnt.

In material terms, these children were looked after, but they too had intrusions into and interferences with their natural development. They were hothouse children, cajoled to compete for the next private school placement, driven by the need to learn Latin verbs, and their mother’s status anxiety.

I remember mothers who had barely left behind their teenage years, who married older men in the hope that money would buy them emotional satisfaction. Their children cut up their Persian carpets and smeared faeces on their fabric wallpaper. Little boys who were fed up of being driven too hard would walk off the bus into the middle of the road, mindless, with no sense of their own identity to preserve.

I also saw manipulative mothers who would sit on the toilet seat pretending to miscarry their baby when they knew they were not pregnant. I watched perfectly manicured birthday parties, where the child was not smiling. In these houses the domestic workers unleashed their rage onto the toddlers; each person seemed consumed by confused desires to be elevated above the rest.

The abuse of children in these houses did not involve knives and guns. Some of the children were battered with belts, locked up – and no one would have guessed, because they went to private school and wore perfectly tailored blazers and velvet dresses with frills. The shine on their little shoes reflected back their sorry faces.

At age nineteen I ran an art club where these rich children would pay for the attendance of ones from an economically disadvantaged background. Every Saturday we covered a building with tarpaulin from top to bottom, all three floors of it. The children would come to be children again. Princes and princesses with fur coats, driven by their security men to the venue, would mix with the youngsters from the local housing estate. The hours passed in magical excitement. We gave them overalls and we let them paint and play; their delight was an experience of childhood that children are often denied.

After completing my first degree in the arts in my early twenties, I began my psychotherapy training. I got to meet the intellectually diverse at Regent’s College and the intellectually intense at the Tavistock clinic; to me the training, although brilliant, seemed insular. The teaching did not really see the children in the context of socially depleted structures. It seemed as if the therapist once trained would require a client who ascribed to the theoretical ideal of the clinical boundary. To me the world described was a virtual world subject to fantasy controls.

I continued my personal analysis, completed the two-year Infant and Child Observation, my art psychotherapy foundation and my four-year psychotherapy M.A., and then I began my journey to work in the inner cities. My personal analysis continued five days a week for sixteen years; it acted as a sounding board at the most difficult times when I was creating the two charities. I also set up the counselling service for a university, and taught and worked there while training.

My first training placement was with the NSPCC Oxford Gardens, where assessments were carried out to ascertain if a parental abuser could be returned to the family home. Here I saw and learnt that the majority of abusers have been abused as children; here I learnt not to judge.

My first job was with a women’s refuge. What devastation violence can cause, but it isn’t as simple as “men hurt women”. Whatever the theoretical explanation, the children in the playground at the refuge wept in their play. The poverty and the lack of resources was shocking. The women were cramped in tiny rooms, disturbed, their children stacked like goods on bunk bed shelves. The refuge workers were poorly paid, poorly trained and not therapeutically supervised. They tried hard, but the outcome was a neglectful service.

By my mid-twenties I was at Family Service Units. Full of aspirations, I decorated the dingy playroom space in the hope of helping children through therapeutic play. It was here that I understood the fundamental flaw in the provision of services to vulnerable children. The assumption is that behind every child is a responsible adult, who will navigate the path to services. The truth is that many of the children we were seeing didn’t have an adult who could bring them to sessions. Many were being abused by their own carers and simultaneously silenced by them.

One December, an educational psychologist made a referral of a seven-year-old girl, who was trying to kill herself. She was wrapping a towel around her neck and covering her head with her plastic reading folder, hoping the lack of oxygen would lead to her death. She was jumping in front of cars and on a number of occasions had been seen on rooftops.

Just before Christmas, I visited the family home, a bleak space. The little seven-year-old was silent: tiny, blonde, frozen, with watchful eyes. But her mother could not bring her to therapy sessions. She had another child with special needs, who took up all her time. Using the suitcase of toys and art materials I had used with the children of the rich when I visited their homes, I decided to see this child in the school library. Our sessions had a peculiar silence about them. She used to draw unusual pictures: children’s heads, and gorilla bodies; a distorted bird with a child’s head. I remember feeling that something terrible was going to be disclosed, and the day came when she shared her secret.

Since the age of five she had been sexually abused by three men who lived in the tower block opposite. Every day this five-year-old had gone from her house to their house, and they had given her toys, but they were sexual ones. I remember feeling desperate as I realized that this child had had no one in her life to be able to share these events with. There was no one to speak to her, no one to listen to her story, and the horrors had been allowed to continue, to continue to the point of her wanting to kill herself.

As a result of child protection requirements I disclosed the contents of her conversations to social services and the police, and then I stood back and watched as she was re-traumatized through the process of disclosure. Medical examinations for which she was not prepared, and then a five-hour police disclosure interview during which words were used that she did not understand. The professionals decided eventually that she would not make a suitable witness. The seven-year-old would not be able to come up with a sequence of events, or attach dates and times to them. They wanted to spare her the humiliation of the court room, but they also devastated her by never honouring their promise to protect her or bring her abusers to justice.

One of the men was a postman. He delivered daily the post to her door. With every delivery, he was reminding her of how powerful he was. Eventually the men re-offended, this time with a twelve-year-old. But for the little seven-year-old girl who had placed her trust in all the grown-ups, the disappointment was too unbearable. She continued to self harm, to want to kill herself. In the end, for her own protection, the family moved to the country. I never saw her again but her experience fuelled me to set up The Place2Be, my first charity.

The school, realizing that they had let down their pupil, and wanting to achieve the best by its pupils, gave me a discarded broom cupboard to work in, which happened to have a window. As I was cleaning the room, I thought to myself, what shall I call it? And then I thought – “the place 2 be”, somewhere where children can be safe to be children. At the time I was teaching at Regent’s College, on the counselling and psychotherapy courses. I encouraged the students there to come down to South London and do their clinical work experience. With these first students came many others including those from different training schools. It turned out that this one therapy room led in time to many more in different schools.

I received a grant from several small foundations initially, and I re-mortgaged my flat, in order to ensure the survival of The Place2Be. One day I came out of my house to find the bailiffs standing outside. Abbey National had decided to take me to court, and I had not received a letter letting me know that this was the case. The bailiffs grinned!

I dashed to the court. The judge, a kindly gentleman, realized that I had used my money to set up a children’s charity, and was both shocked and surprised. He told Abbey National he would not take my flat away, and eventually I paid them back.

In the same way Kids Company was created – using my mortgage and re-mortgaging. As The Place2Be took off, the government visited, suggesting that I turn it into a charity so that they could give me Department of Health and Education funding.

It was politically a tough time. The Child Psychotherapy Association didn’t want me to set up in the inner cities in this way. They had a meeting to decide what to do, and after some deliberation they agreed to offer me support. But sometimes their support was toxic, their envy out of control. Some of the most senior people in the Association were extremely helpful because their career experiences had demonstrated to them that therapeutic support was sparse, and not accessible enough to poor inner-city children. At the time there were three-year waiting lists in child guidance in the inner cities, and children who desperately needed therapeutic intervention could not receive it.

After five years of setting up The Place2Be, when I was in my early thirties, I made the most painful decision of my life. I knew I had to leave in order to ensure the survival of The Place2Be.

Since then, its founding history has from time to time been airbrushed. It saddens me how my personal history is being rewritten, but an admirable job has been made of ensuring its continued survival and success.

In December 1996, when I left The Place2Be, I immediately founded Kids Company, using £20,000 donated to me by a local authority. I wanted to reach the most marginalized and the most disadvantaged. I was curious about the children who were not going to school.

My original intention was to take over some railway arches and renovate them, so that we could bring the children we were seeing for therapeutic support in the schools there during the holidays and look after them, then return them to school.

The railway arches in Camberwell were the birthplace of Kids Company. We took two arches at first. They were due to be opened from three to seven o’clock. We decorated them, anticipating that we would receive children from the schools, but the word spread on the streets, and in our early days, we ended up with about a hundred adolescent boys.

I remember those early days, I remember being so profoundly out of my depth. So terrified. I have the memory of the blood draining out of my cheeks, as I didn’t know how to deal with this group. They in turn would arrive every day, sarcastic and curious. They would pull out little knives and rip the furniture and the fabrics. They would roll up their joints and burn their cigarettes into the chairs. I don’t know what held me there, despite my terror. The only thing I remember is my Persian hospitality. At three o’clock, I would open the gate, welcome them, and ask them not to spit! They now tell me they found me fascinating, as I never retaliated, never shouted, and no matter what they did I kept opening the doors. Throughout this initial year I was greatly helped by Sue Reuben, who supported us financially and practically.

As time went on, approximately another hundred children, predominantly the children of drug addicts, arrived. Whereas the adolescent boys had been able to feed themselves through committing crimes, these younger ones were failing to thrive. We were seeing children gaunt with malnutrition, children who were losing their hair, children who were scavenging in bins. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock.

At first, I desperately tried to get social services involved, but I was hitting their thresholds all the time, and they were not taking the cases. At the time I could not understand why. But a number of years later someone explained to me that the children I was referring, who were suffering from neglect and being left without food, were not eligible for support, because social services were so under-resourced and snowed under with cases of sexual and physical abuse. I suddenly understood why the eleven-year-old who called social services desperate about the fact that there was no food in the cupboard was not getting the help. As I visited social services and read these children’s files I realized the neglect and abuse they were experiencing was chronic.

I cried. Sometimes I felt so exhausted, and at night, I felt overwhelmed by the burden of what I had started. But at no time did I ever contemplate giving up, because in front of me, every day, were examples of tremendous courage. These children who struggled to survive. And as I got to know them, they began telling me their life stories, and I began writing them down. They were horrific stories of young children battered, shot at, beaten, hurled to the wall as parents struggled with drug withdrawal. These were children who, in order to survive, had become drug couriers or drug-dealers. Some were doing bank robberies, some were making £4000 a week and sharing it among the whole group. And these were children who could not be returned to school, who’d been out of education for a number of years. Seventeen-year-olds who were capable of killing but could not write their names or addresses.

I struggled against the local authority as the local authority became aware of my witnessing the real statistics. Sixty per cent of the first hundred who had arrived had not been in education, and no one had gone looking for them. No one wanted them back. Their behaviour and emotional difficulties put pressure on the school classroom, and teachers were only too glad to lose them.

Those early days, I didn’t even understand a word the children said. I didn’t understand their street language, their criminal network, and very early on I realized that I had to employ some males from the community who could interpret the children’s world and who could support us. They were exceptional people who joined the company, but they were people who had had no education, no training, no history of employment. They had tremendous natural capacities to deal with the children who had arrived, but they also had difficulties in being honest, in turning up on time, and in understanding therapeutic thinking.

I had ended up with a workforce made up of qualified therapists, trained in the schools of Hampstead, and unqualified workers who were brilliant with the children. In the beginning the only thing these two workforces had in common was their combined hatred of the children. The children made them angry and rageful. The children trod on their dignity as their own dignity had been trodden on. The children terrorized them as they had been terrorized, and we struggled every day for some safe control.

There were several key transition points in the provision of the service. The first of these was when we offered an evening meal, which we did not charge the children for. This felt as if it was a significant milestone in the development of the organization. The children thought us different from other provisions, because we were engaging in an act of care without asking for something back for it. Then we began providing bus passes and living allowances to the most disadvantaged. In this way, we were addressing the core problems of poverty which were driving the children into criminal activity.

An environment of trust developed at the Arches. Young people now knew that they could turn to us and we were prepared to stand by them. In the meantime I struggled to develop therapeutic thinking and practices and to develop services which would meet the needs of these youngsters in appropriate ways. The biggest hurdle that I encountered was lack of funding. Because the children and young people were self-referring, they were not arriving at our door with pots of money attached to them. When we went back to social services, to try to see that their basic needs were met, we were told often it would be best if we didn’t find these children in the first place as the local authority’s budget could not cope. We faced the same challenges as the children – adult drug addicts and dealers who attempted to shoot us and drove a car onto our premises to run over the children or who arrived with knives to stab us.

We struggled against other people’s prejudices. We were at one point removed from our premises due to corruptions and injustices. Very very few of the parents of the 125 children who were reliant on our evening meals and came to us from the immediate streets, dared to stand up and say their children needed this service. The most shocking part of our eviction from our premises was the fact that not a single politician and just one council official stood by these children (the Director of Children’s Social Services in Southwark submitted a letter of support). No one seemed keen to see what would happen to the children if the lifeline of Kids Company was severed. I had to go as far as the Court of Appeal trying to represent the approximately 500 children using the service at the time.

History will set the record straight. It will all come out in the wash. The children were evicted on the grounds of loss of amenities to the residents. Someone forgot that the children were residents too. That injustice compounded my resolve to stand by the children.

Eventually we were given other premises thanks to Lambeth Council and Granada TV, who generously renovated a once derelict warehouse for us. A firm of builders, Interior and Exterior, carried out and paid for all the refurbishment and they continued to support us with other projects.

Kids Company nearly closed on several occasions. The staff here were so dedicated, they refused to leave. Eventually, after the politicking, the raising awareness, and the appearing in the media, we were offered a £3.4 million grant (over three years and only if we matched it with our own fundraising from businesse...