As local business owners many of us care deeply about our community and endeavour to help make it a better place to live, work and play.  Just occasionally something happens to make us sit up and question the status quo.

Camila Batmangeldish from a charity called ‘Kids Company’ spoke last week at the UK Community Foundation Conference in Bristol where she gave a very moving and compelling address. She explained how currently our most violent children are described as criminals and often dealt with in custody and inevitably reoffend. She pointed out that the majority of these children had been mistreated and violated since they were very small and recent research shows that this kind of abuse and neglect affects the physical wiring of children’s brains – she also showed evidence of brain scans of disturbed children and how they significantly differ resulting in children being unable to balance their emotions and energy because of extreme and chronic exposure to fright hormones.


This can lead some of these children to ‘flip’ often resulting in a dramatic incident to expel  the tension and trauma they are experiencing. Apart from the horrendous facts about the lack of care and abuse these children suffer, it is concerning how we as a society are dealing with these children  unfortunately this is not something just found in the London suburbs.  Camila was speaking in Bristol where she has also been working with similar cases.

Kids Company help thousands of children every year and it would be naive to think that this problem doesn’t exist in Worcestershire. Camila explained, that what these children need more than anything to begin with is to feel safe. Kids Company reaches 36,000 across London and beyond and support 18,000 intensively, looking after every aspect of their welfare both emotional and physical 24/7 with amazing success.  It is clearly a wonderful formula for offering a ‘wraparound model’ of care for these children – something I’m sure we’d like to see replicated across the country.

For more information visit www.kidsco.org.uk

Louise Hewett