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Shattered Lives

Shattered Lives

Children Who Live with Courage and Dignity

Camila Batmanghelidjh

Hardback: £19.99 / $19.95

2006, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 176pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-434-6, BIC 2: JKSB1 JKSN JMC MBPK

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Paperback: £11.99 / $19.95

2007, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 176pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-603-6, BIC 2: JKSB1 JKSN JMC MBPK

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Extract from 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!