I feel the need to express my opinion on the stories I so often read about Kids Company. I was eight when I first met Kids Company staff at my school in south London. I was then introduced to other staff and attended a centre in Camberwell every day after school.
The support, warmth, care and love I received helped me escape my reality, which consisted of sexual, physical and emotional abuse from members of my own family.
Kids Company helped me fight the system and get me into care. They have been the only consistent, trustworthy and truly caring people I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life, and three of them are some of the best people I know now.
I think the allegations are appalling (Kids Company attacks ‘irresponsible’ BBC for way it revealed sex abuse allegations, 1 August). I’m not saying they are or are not true. I know I have never experienced, nor have I known anyone who has experienced, these horrendous things in connection to Kids Company.
Camila Batmanghelidjh is one of the most kind-hearted, honest and reliable people I know, and would do anything not only for her young people but for young people in general.
I received an allowance from Kids Company in 2011. This paid my rent to ensure I and my dad had a place to sleep that was safer than a pub full of alcoholics and rapists. This paid for food to ensure that I, my sister and my dad didn’t suffer from malnutrition. It also paid for clothes for when I was regularly admitted to hospital and had no one to bring me clothes.
So I am writing because I think people should see both sides rather than this horrendous picture the media are attempting to paint.
Name and address supplied
• I am writing to express my dismay about the opinion piece by Peter Beresford (How did Kids Company get so far away from those it was meant to help?, theguardian.com, 3 August). It contained almost no evidence to support any of the author’s statements and appeared to be simply a character assassination of the founder of Kids Company, Camila Batmanghelidjh.
In his piece, Professor Beresford conflates a large number of disparate theories and concepts, at the same time as seeming to misrepresent the core argument made by Kids Company that early abuse or neglect can damage or disrupt the brains of those subjected to such experiences. Although negative experiences in early life do not inevitably lead to changes in brain structure or function, there is now compelling evidence from hundreds of neuroimaging studies that severe deprivation, abuse, or neglect in early life can have a negative impact on brain development.
Kids Company does not claim that the young people it works with are biologically hard-wired to be violent or deviant, but rather that abusive experiences in childhood increase the individual’s risk of developing emotional or behavioural problems later in life. This again has been amply supported by research in clinical psychology and psychiatry. No doubt Professor Beresford would dismiss this substantial body of evidence as “pseudoscience”, but I believe that this reflects a lack of understanding on his part, and he is almost certainly unqualified to judge the veracity of the neuroscience-based claims made by Kids Company.
My final point is that Professor Beresford seems to criticise Kids Company for the fact that its service users’ voices have not been heard in the media. It seems unreasonable to lay the blame for this on Kids Company rather than journalists in the print and broadcast media. Are they supposed to parade their service users in front of the media, breaking confidentiality in the process?
Dr Graeme Fairchild
Associate professor of psychology, University of Southampton
