Charity Chief Lashes Out At Labelling Of Obese Children

Unwitting professionals are putting vulnerable children at risk of bullying by labelling them as obese or suffering from mental health problems, according to an outspoken charity leader.

Camila Batmanghelidjh said that since obesity moved on to the government agenda, many more children were being teased in school about their body shape.

“Is it really right to define children by their diseases? As adults we do it with goodwill, but we are not really thinking carefully about the implications for the lives of children,” she told the Guardian Healthy Kids Summit yesterday.

Ms Batmanghelidjh, who has won acclaim for her work with challenging, often violent young people at Kids Company, said the same problems applied to children labelled disturbed or antisocial.

“They can be taught to deal with their emotional distress, but they are not going to manage if they are called names and labelled,” she told the conference in London.

A shake-up of children’s services is needed to make it easier for such children to ask for help, she said. Abused five year olds don’t know how to find social services departments. That makes it vital to have somewhere in each school that children could go for help.

She said the workforce needed to be re-educated about how to work with these children, who may have suffered years of abuse. Therapists who remained calm and professionally distant could threaten children who knew only violence and turbulence, she added.

Ms Batmangehelidjh said brain science showed these children were driven by emotional issues and lashed out without thinking.

“We need to give them loving care. Attachment is most important, so an appointment at a clinic once a fortnight is no good for these children. We need to go back to a feeling repertoire but in a managed way,” she said.

Kids Company serves 11,000 children across London with two drop-in centres and projects in 30 schools. Ms Batmanghelidjh has threatened to close the charity by April unless it finds secure long-term funding.

“I will never walk away from these children. But they are too important to be left to the mercy of leftovers,” she said.

The children Ms Batmanghelidjh works with had been attacked or abused since early childhood and, by their teens, had shut down emotionally as a survival response. They attack others because they have no faith in civil society; it hasn’t helped them, she said.

“There is a chance civil society could step in at that point but instead we call them names or give them Asbos,” she said.

“I’ve sat in meetings where social services decide to leave children to commit a crime because then they will get help as youth justice is where we put resources. Services are so under-resourced they do everything they can not to take a case. We need to change the way we do things.”