Abused children need more help, says charity boss Camila Batmanghelidjh

 
Camila Batmanghelidjh with David Cameron in 2010
27 September 2013

Charity boss Camila Batmanghelidjh today warned that traumatised children were being “demonised” as she called on the Government to fund a massive expansion of care.

The founder of Kids Company said just £11million a year per local authority would allow the “re-parenting” of 11,500 abused or neglected children through street-level centres.

The centres would be open from 9am to 10pm every day, and be staffed by psychologists, child therapists and artists, with a phone-line at night in case they were in trouble.

Key workers could act in loco parentis and could attend school parents’ nights and provide hot meals and activities for the youngsters.

The model currently operates at Kids Company – which helps 36,000 children every year – but would be expanded to provide additional support to social services.

Ms Batmanghelidjh told a conference on vulnerable children at the LSE: “We’re in a country where children who are profoundly traumatised are also demonised. The public often perceive themselves as being persecuted by these kids, whereas we need to collectively take responsibility for looking after them.

“There’s a need to rethink our working model with the most vulnerable children and we’ve got to have the moral courage to do that. We need a re-parenting of children that have been abused.”

Shadow education minister Sharon Hodgson criticised the Government’s failure to come up with funding given it would be cheaper to help children avoid the criminal justice or care systems in the first place.

“To see the sums of money that are thrown on them when society has failed them, when we haven’t helped them, I just thought this is madness,” she said.

Professor Sandra Jovchelovitch, a social psychologist at the LSE, warned that children in gangs would go on suffering until society recognised they were in dire need of help.

“The politicians are not going to pay attention in the way they should because society thinks about those children as criminals, as not deserving,” she said.

“Society doesn’t want to see them because to look at them in the face means to recognise something that the vast majority of people are not prepared to recognise.

“It’s much easier to think of them as little criminals rather than as children that need support.”

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