Camila Batmanghelidjh - Founder of the Kids Company HARDtalk

Now on BBC News, it's time for These are tough times to be young.

Record unemployment in many countries, frustration is building

and they are spilling onto the streets. If you are young and

vulnerable, you can often fall through the cracks and descending

to a spiral of suffering and exploitation. My guests today is

British psychotherapist Camila Batmanghelidjh. She said up the

Kids Company in 1996. A network of dropping centres in London where

thousands of deprived and needy young people receive love, care and

shoulder. She says she has some of Camilla Welcome to Hard -- Camila

Batmanghelidjh, Welcome to Hard Talk. Do you think governments who

have the right approach when it comes to young people? 99.9 % of

young people internationally are law-abiding and contribute

enormously to society. But there is about 1% to experience difficulties.

Some of them because their environments are challenging, for

example street children who do not have any carers exhibit criminal

the habeas as a means of survival. Others have got some significant

psychological difficulties. What governments have tended to do his

deal with the difficulties of children who exhibit

vulnerabilities in pretty much the same way, which is to use a method

of punishment and reward. You punish bad behaviour, reward good

behaviour and, in that way, it is thought to keep the children within

a law-abiding framework. However, you need an additional model, which

is to consider that there are some children who cannot actually manage

their own behaviour because they have had injuries to their

development. Basically what you are saying is that governments

everywhere are criminalising the problem and looking at it that way.

But is that the case, if you look at the UK, which is where you

operator centres, you look at Iain Duncan Smith who says our

Government believes that investing in support to stabilise and

vulnerable families is the best starting point for tackling

disadvantage and poverty, which can give rise to some of the problems

you have to will the bout. They are not actually blaming, are they?

There is a discrepancy between government rhetoric and actual

delivery. The bottom line is still too many children... And Britain

docks up more children than any European country and 85% of them

reoffending two years. If you look at all the Criminal Justice

programmes around the world involving children, there is an 80%

reoffending rate. We are operating a model currently across the world

of dealing with vulnerable children, which is not very efficient, except

the Scandinavians. Scandinavians perceived children who exhibit

extreme and dangerous behaviours as having mental health difficulties,

and I believe that is correct. they have a more sympathetic

approach, which is basically the kind of line that you adopt. But is

that child-centred approach enough? Than to have to look at the problem

families, as that is where the problem originates, and tried to

help them at that level and not isolate the trialled? I agree.

do need to deal with problem families. -- isolate the child.

if you have limited resources, it is imperative you reach the

children above all else. When you look at problem families, parents

unable to care for their children, and you look at their history is,

what you find is that they are predominantly adults who have been

experiencing childhood maltreatment. They have been abused and neglected

as children. You do not get a parent being randomly incapable of

bonding all attaching to their child and taking care of their

child. Parental instinct is so powerful and primitive, that if it

goes wrong, they must be good reasons why it has gone wrong. I

would argue that the damage begins invariably in childhood. So child

would mental-health and well being is the primary driver that

governments should organise themselves around. -- childhood.

so when I asked you about the approach governments have, they are

really buying what you have said. If you look at the latest

initiatives this government has introduced, the troubled families

initiative, whereby David Cameron says he wants to help 120,000 of

the most troubled families by 2015, he has also rolled out a trial for

better parenting, whereby parents of children from the age of the

zero -5 can have support to try to improve their parenting skills, he

would approve of that? The current government in Britain has made

enormous progress. -- you would approve. In changing the way it

begins to think about a troubled families. But the difficulty is

that the rhetoric is beautiful but the resources are not really there.

I will explain why. In Britain, there is a structure which demands

that if a child is having difficulties, you refer them to

social services, mental health, housing. The difficulty in Britain

is that those primary agencies are at breaking point. They don't have

the money or the resources to deal with the scale of referrals.

the Government says the cost of these families... There is a cost

of about �9 billion and most of that money is not providing lasting

results. They say they will give about �0.5 billion, about 700,000 -

- $700 million, over three years. That is real money. I think that is

excellent, that they are doing that, but I believe that actually what we

need is a radical approach, which is to convene an independent

inquiry and look at the life chances of vulnerable children in

this country and laid down a 15- year vision. What is happening is

the imminent one political party has some initiatives, and they are

out of power, most of the initiatives drop again. They are

not sustained. These initiatives will only be successful if they are

sustained. What my dream is, to see them all come together and signed

up to a 15 or 20-year vision up strengthening the childcare system

in Britain. You have been working with the most needy and vulnerable

children over 20 years. Either the 1996 he set up the Kids Company.

Your four dropping centres in London, you also have a social

network available in around 40 schools, whereby children can have

access to therapy if they want it. Give us an idea of the kind of

young people you have been dealing with. You have about 17,000 at the

moment? We deal with 17,000 vulnerable children and they very

invulnerability. The ones who come to our street level centres, 84% of

them arrived homeless. 87% have multiple traumas. I am talking

about children who have been multiplies sexually abused, they

have been deprived of food. -- will deplete sexually abused. They have

been harmed by carers and complete strangers, like drug dealers who

come into their homes. So when the children arrive, they are

incredibly disturbed but they also tend to not have the basic

necessities, like underwear, toothbrush, somewhere to sleep.

Right now, as I speak to you, we have a waiting list for 500 beds

because children are sleeping on the floor. People would find that

difficult in one of the richest countries in the world. But the

truth is, in Britain, there are some large numbers of children who

are below the radar, surviving on the streets, who are very

vulnerable because Dundee was at getting hold of them and running

them as couriers. -- because drug dealers are getting cold. And there

are a significant numbers of girls being sexually abused in street

gangs. These children are what I call lone children. They may have a

parent they are living with but the parent has difficulties of their

own. They may be an addict, alcoholic, they may have

significant and on contained mental health difficulties. A very toxic

combination. And the child is being themselves up. What is the average

age? Usually about the 10 or 11- year-old arrives. And then we go

back to the house when they trust us and we find toddlers, very small

children, sometimes in these houses. An additional problem in Britain is

the problem of non-status individuals. These are individuals

who may have come from other countries, they don't have any

legal papers and Britain has made a rule of not supporting these people.

Children seeking asylum, which is not just from the UK but everywhere.

They may be all over the world. talk about those children who are

below the radar. Frankly, you do not know if there are children out

there who are even kilojoule raider, do you? That is very true. -- even

though your reader. That is why I feel so passionately about this

issue. Children inside social services and child mental-health

officers, and are known about, are only a fraction of those in need.

For every single one of those children, there are hundreds of

others that nobody has actually paid attention to. The

internationally recognised figure for a child could maltreatment in

Britain is about 1.5 million children. That is a lot. What do

you think can be done to try to get... Make sure these children are

protected from difficult circumstances at home? Is there a

method? We know many children fall through the cracks and are abused

at home. What is interesting is at the Kids Company, 97% of the

children itself referred. That means the children hear about us on

the streets and make their way to ask. What we found is that children

who are being maltreated often know each other. So, for example, one

child of a drug addict will probably know another 30 children,

because their parents used together. What I would like to see his street

level centres open seven days a week from 9am until 10pm, where the

children in that neighbourhood know that if they ever hit crisis, they

can make their way to their centres. But you have come up with this idea

of roving bands. Explain that to us, whereby you tried to detect if

children are being abused in any way by dropping in unannounced. --

roving vehicles. What I wanted was children who are recognised as

living in households where the parents are harming them,

especially under-fives, children who end up on what we call the

child protection register in Britain, I would like the

possibility for social workers to have a key to that household and to

be able to let themselves in at any point to check on that child's

well-being. I understand... This is a privacy problem. It brings up the

surveillance tight society. understand that if one were to do

that, you would compromise somebody's privacy. -- type.

for me, it is a choice between that and the safety of a toddler. A

toddler who is being harmed in a household warrants protection and

is a greater priority than a parent who seeks to have personal privacy.

I think if you are abusing your child, you forgo your right to

privacy in the service of your child being made safer. But it

brings the back to that point of the child-centred approach. Nobody

would argue what you just said, I suppose, but you accept that

wherever possible, it is best to keep the children with their

families? Wherever possible it is. Children are profoundly loyal and,

even if the parent is harming them, forgiving towards the parent. The

ideal growth environment is an appropriate home a cup -- home

environment. But at the same time, society has to be truthful and

admit that there are certain households with children are at

risk and we have got to be robust in protecting those children.

do now actually have some of money from the Government, don't you, to

run your centres? How do we know that you are doing the right

Our government funding is only 20% of that total income. We got it

from central government because the local authorities did not recognise

ask for help directly. You have a fairly stringent evaluation process.

Central government comes and evaluate us. We have passed out

clinical and financial or debts with high assurance and no

recommendation for improvement. We also have independent researchers

constantly with us measuring efficiency of our expenditure, but

also our clinical model. Had you demonstrate your results? Of the

17,000 students, you can say that these numbers are doing this and

sell one. You have been on the record saying it is not easy. You

were quoted as saying that the focus of measurement is potentially

useful for organisations that can be measured, but destructive for

complex organisations. I use a complex organisation? We have

children at both ends of the spectrum. We have children and

young people who have gone on to university. At up to 120 children,

100 went to university. -- out of 220. They are succeeding and

progressing in ways that are visible, we can produce evidence.

The difficulty arises when you have a child who is profoundly

traumatised. You have to measure where that they are having less

nightmares at night. Or are they are waiting be bad less. But their

muscular structure is less rigid with terror and they are allowing

you to sit next to eat them. That is progress. To governments, and to

external agencies, that does not look like Lammas progress.

Nevertheless, you have to be able to stabilise a child

psychologically firmer they can go one to attain education. There is

scrutiny for that? Yes, berries. Neuroscience, the ability to look

into the brain, has advanced so much that we are at the cusp of

something very exciting. We are getting measures of the level of

stress at a brain level in children. Newport 16 electrodes on their

heads, it is not going into a scanning machine, and you get a

real picture of the functioning of their brains. There is definitely a

measurement for the future. tuck about sexual exploitation of

young girls. In the UK, we have a very public case of a young white

British girl being sexually exploited in the north of England

by a man who gave them food and cigarettes and alcohol for sexual

favours. Had you deal with this particular aspect of abuse of

children? I think that sexual exploitation of children is one of

the biggest risks internationally because of the internet. Now, you

have a number of factors playing into it. Adults can access children

through the internet. Children are accessing very perverse and

inappropriate sexual lies to sadistic material that is

interfering with their normal development and the ring them

towards per first -- perverse functioning. Jordan Armour

vulnerable to sexual exploitation. -- children are more vulnerable.

What was interesting in Rochdale and Oxford is that predominately

the goals that were sexually abuse were in the care of local Bootes --

the girls. We have a care structure that is not protecting the children

that we deemed too vulnerable. -- the local authorities. It is not

just in the UK, but the Leader the world. In this particular case in

the UK, people are tired about a racial and ethnic dynamic. The man,

the abusers, were a return Arabic men. You come from a different

background, your mother was Iranian Muslim and due came here at what he

is of age. We do you stand on that? I do not believe that religion in

its purest sense or ethnicity leads to the sexual abuse of others. He

of the human beings want to behave in a perverse way, they can use a

number of theoretical frameworks like religion, ethnicity, gender

and abuse those to justify their inappropriate behaviours. We have

to be very careful not to generalise. That we must accept is

that there was an abuse of a framework of the reef. By example,

Muslim religion, too justified behaviour that the Muslim religion

itself would find unacceptable. Absolutely. We attract about

charred abuse, looking at the frustration that has spilled onto

the streets. They could youth unemployment. The EU average is

22.5 bus stop 16.5 % in the US. It is a bad time to be a young person.

That is no excuse for the riots that we saw in the UK last year.

People turning to crime, is it? There is absolutely no excuse for

turning to crime. If you look to the riots in the summer and the

statistics that emerged out of that, 66% of the young people who were

involved in the riots had special educational needs. 32% where Sir

Paul that they have to access school meals. -- where surplus off.

If you look at the exclusion, a large amount of those young people

had been permanently excluded from high school. That time concluded is

that whichever way you look at it, the drivers of extreme unrest in

Britain are likely to be individuals with exceptional

vulnerabilities. When you have something like Sean Bailey, a

community worker, this says that we have not heard our children a

Mollie wrong culture. We need to talk about responsibility. You are

not saying that because you have no money that you should turn to crime

and rioting. There are plenty of people who are lower abiding.

learned abiding. I completely agree. You must ask yourself where the

children pick up the notion of entitlement and grabbing psychology.

You are talking about a nation whose prime minister Margaret

Thatcher stood up and said there is no such thing as a community or

society and get on your bikes and go and find work. The point I'm

making is that if you see children who are behaving anti- socially,

please look at the adults around them, because I promise you, the

framework and the example emanates from the adult world. A final

question. Do you think that regardless of where a young person

comes from, if they are young and valuable and have problems, is

there a universal approach OP one- size-fits-all solution?

universal approach is interesting. The latest brain research is

showing that the ability to be laughed and at the receiving end of

lava is the number one positive ingredients in stabilising brain

functioning and keeping a child's at a process to a level. We are now

finding that the attachment at Chard has to his maternal care

determines that child's ability to keep their behaviour prose so sure.

Paternal love develops in the fund part of the brain. The area used to

control impulses and movement. there a solution of one size fits

all? Yes. Create opportunities or of giving children and young people

a sense of belonging and detachment and their chair it. If young people