Frontline London: ‘We have a new type of kid on the block. They kill you and don’t even run away’

In a scathing interview, Kids Company chief blasts government failure to help disturbed children — and warns of more murders
Camila Batmanghelidjh at Kids Co head office in Southwark
Alex Lentati
26 September 2013
WEST END FINAL

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The chief of London’s most powerful children’s charity has accused the Government of abandoning the capital’s most disturbed children and of playing fast and loose with their lives and the safety of ordinary Londoners.

In an excoriating interview with the Standard, Camila Batmanghelidjh, the chief executive of Kids Company, which intensively works with 18,000 of London’s most vulnerable children, warned that we should expect more gang-related murders with innocent Londoners caught in the crossfire unless something was done. It was, she said, “the inevitable consequence of chronic under-investment in marginalised young people both by this Government and previous administrations”.

“Successive governments have for many years adopted a morally corrupt approach,” she said. “They have let thousands of London’s most profoundly disturbed children generate and live in a culture of ‘normalised’ violence, where stabbings and shootings are commonplace. There is no vision. They need to wake up before it’s too late.”

Ms Batmanghelidjh, 50, issued her plea for action in the wake of a University College London study, reported in yesterday’s Standard, depicting many young Londoners growing up amid shockingly high rates of shootings, stabbings and murder comparable with the notorious favelas of Rio.

She also issued a stark warning about a growing link between abandoned children and fundamentalism. “London could face more depraved murders if we don’t take the UCL report seriously,” she said.

“Youngsters who are victims of child abuse at 12 are demonised when they become criminals and then along comes a fundamentalist, who they might meet in prison, who gives their violence heroic purpose.

“As one senior police officer told me: ‘We’ve got a new type of kid on the block — they kill you and they don’t even run away’. A kid who grows up with friends murdered in turf wars as the norm and no longer cares if they live or die is the most dangerous. That’s the kind of child we’re working to reform at Kids Company, but I am sick and tired of begging successive Prime Ministers to give me the money to do the job.”

The charismatic founder of the charity, awarded a CBE in February for her work with underprivileged children, said she is “no longer prepared to fund this critical work for London through cupcake sales and cocktail parties”.

Setting out her store at her colourful office in Southwark, she told the Standard that funding had dried up and that unless the Government agrees to properly fund her £20 million-a-year charity, she will be forced to close its street-level centres, which handle their most disturbed cases, leaving it to pick up the pieces.

The Government currently give Kids Company £4 million a year, leaving Ms Batmanghelidjh to raise the remaining £16 million, which she gets from around 44,000 different sources and which has left her “completely exhausted”.

A letter from the Prime Minister, seen by the Standard, in which he tells Ms Batmanghelidjh to be grateful for the £4 million-a-year grant and that all government help will cease after April 2015, has left her furious.

“They want me to be grateful as if they’re doing me a favour,” she fumed. “I’ve spent 17 years on the street – I’ve been spat at, strangled, threatened, and I’ve hung in there with gang leaders and drug dealers because I want to show these kids can be saved.

“Big business is saying, quite rightly, that we’re a proven programme now and that the Government should be funding us. Our work must be mainstreamed now. I work seven days a week until 11pm and I have not had a single day’s break this summer. I want to work collaboratively with the Government, and I do appreciate the funding that they have given us, but it’s time for David Cameron to go beyond his predecessors and fully get behind our work so we can get on with making London safer without the drain of endless fundraising.”

The rise of Kids Company from a tiny, one-woman charity founded in 1996 to a 600-strong organisation and the biggest single employer of psychotherapists outside the NHS was due in part, she said, to the failure of the care system in London. “Our care system is poorly led and terribly underfunded. I’ve had a borough head of children’s services visit my office and tell me: “I’m sitting on a bucket of sh**. By the grace of God it hasn’t blown in my face’. Children’s services don’t have the resources to cope with their most disturbed children, and they end up self-referring to Kids Company.”

But why not leave London’s criminal gang problems to the police? “I have so much sympathy for the police because they are left mopping up the failures of social care. But they admit they cannot cope on their own with the scale of violence on our streets. Not even the police think the police are the whole answer.”

Her outspoken comments come in the wake of strong backing of the Kids Company model by academic experts from two of London’s leading universities. Professor Essi Viding at University College London, said: “If a middle-class 15-year-old child witnessed something horrific like a friend’s murder, their parent would help them process it, but for thousands of children, there is no trusted adult to talk to and protect them. The brilliance of Kids Company is that they provide a re-parenting intervention package that mimics the middle-class environment.”

Professor Sandra Jovchelovitch, whose research team at the London School of Economics reviewed the model of work of Kids Company, was similarly impressed. “Kids Company do something that is outside the language of the care system: they provide love for kids who don’t have anything. The formal care system is focused on management and box ticking whereas Kids Company provide food, therapy, education, legal and job support and cement it together with love.

“Our research found the Kids Company model is the most effective for dealing with vulnerable children and that it deserves to be supported and disseminated nationally and internationally.”

But what of the case of the chaotic gang member we reported yesterday? He invited the Standard to see his life from the inside and help him go straight, but he had failed to turn up for the apprenticeship we helped him secure and had gone to ground. He had been a client of Kids Company on and off since age 13, having survived his father’s alleged attempt to kill him. Why had Kids Company not been able to help?

“With these types of severely damaged children, you’ve really got to hang in there,” said Ms Batmanghelidjh. “You have to be relentless in your care and be prepared to go backwards and forwards. Often they self-sabotage the relationship with the key-worker or employer. They feel too much pain and want to shut down their emotions. You have to treat them like your child – put their art on your walls, call them back when they text you. A former leader of the Peckham Boys once told me: ‘I hate you because you’ve made me too soft to fight’. What these kids need to see from us is absolute passion for their wellbeing, yet also saying, ‘I can’t care more than you’.

“We can get there in the end, but they need lots of work to calm them down. It’s like they’ve swallowed a helicopter with the propeller turning. They are in a constant hyper-aroused disturbed state. Often they have mental health problems that need addressing.

They can’t fall asleep, they have nightmares, they cry in their sleep, scream, wet their beds. When they wake up, it’s like a truck has driven over them because all night they’ve been at war. Our approach is to give them a routine and long-term therapeutic support. This is my frustration with the Government. They release them into society, from care or prison, with nothing to do and little help.”

The Kids Company track record gives cause for hope. More than 80 per cent of their clients are involved in crime, yet after Kids Company have worked with them, 90 per cent have given up crime and a similar percentage returned to education, with 69 per cent finding employment. Many go on to university, including Oxford and Cambridge.

But the precipitous growth of their street-level caseload from a few dozen kids 17 years ago to 18,000 today is not something they can sustain on the limited government funding they have. “It is time for our government to do the right thing,” she said.

“Don’t throw me a bone for £4 million when £20 million is what it takes to do the job. Don’t tell me you don’t have the cash when you announce a £100 million package for cyclists. Ultimately this is not about a charity called Kids Company. This is about the way we deal with disturbed children in our midst and about the safety of all children in London. If Kids Company were disbanded tomorrow but the system was fixed, I’d be very happy.”

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