to think Camila Batmanghelidjh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kid's Company Charity Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

Boffin, it's not as unlikely as you are implying

recent paper

(Not that I'm in favour of CB, but it's interesting science).

As I think I said, if what she says about epigenetics is true, the entire generation of WW2 babies would have grown up to be ravings nutters by now.

One of the problems for the "children are permanently damaged by hardship" argument (not even in its "and they pass that to their children" or "and it causes cellular damage" extended forms) is that the generation born immediately before the war, and therefore sentient and forming memories and experiences through the war, doesn't appear to have any elevated rates of mental illness. And that's not just true of the UK, that's true of Germany, Russia, Holland, Japan...places where the levels of privation and struggle children born in 1935 would have experienced was immensely greater.

This is becaus there is a total misunderstanding about what epigenetics is!

Firstly, it is a POSITIVE thing, not a negative thing, it doesn't make you ill.

Epigenetics is a mechanism by which the experiences in a woman's life turn genes in the eggs she is carrying on and off,

This is to ensure that children she may later give birth to are born already slightly better adapted to the environment she has experienced, be that cold, hot, dangerous, safe, abundantly supplied with food, less well supplied. Our epigenetics largely come from our mothers, but with some residual influence from her mother and maternal grandmother too.

Epigenetics does not make people mentally ill. It may make people more alert, sleep less, have an increased appetite, less or more discerning eaters, faster to lay down fat, etc.

There may be a mismatch between the mothers environment that we are adapted to, and our own environment we are living in, which may be occasionally inconvenient, but on the whole epigenetic has had a positive effect on human health and happiness for millennia.

it's interesting science

Have you read the paper, rather than the Guardian summary?

It's not remotely my field (I suspect BoffinMum might know more) but n=32 for the effect group and n=8 (no typo) for the control, and for offspring n=22 and n=9 (ditto) doesn't strike me as hugely convincing. The control group appears to be recruited solely on the basis of being "Jewish".

Much more parsimonious explanation: "Jewish" is not genetically homogenous. The effect claimed is therefore a genetic marker indicative of inhomogeneity between the effect group (European Jews) and control group (I suspect descendants of Jewish families that arrived in the US in the late 19th century).

The paper hints at this:

Holocaust survivors were defined as being interned in a Nazi concentration camp, having witnessed or experienced torture, or having to flee or hide during WWII. Demographically comparable controls were living outside of Europe during WWII.

"Demographically comparable" needs a lot more explanation. The definition of "survivors" covers everything from people who were liberated from Belsen to people who arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport in 1937, and with the numbers so low, that's a huge range of experiences.

Surely, what the study needs to do is to compare similar markers in children of (say) Burma Railroad survivors, with their cousins whose parents did not have the same experiences

Burma Railroad survivors

These are men though,

These are men though,

Good point. Women who survived Singapore, then.

I did read the paper. I thought the control group was small, and it was over interpreted. But it was still interesting, and I imagine there will be a lot of future work in a similar vein.

I was at a conference a while ago where someone presented data showing that if a grandmother suffered severe stress while pregnant, the granddaughter was more likely to suffer from depression. I must see if it's been published.

Anyway, I don't think we should derail the thread into epigenetics. My only point was that CB's point about 'cellular damage' might not be as absurd as we think, although I am assuming she knows about epigenetics...

Although I suspect CB is going to start claiming that not only is KC's dissolution going to make savages out of the youth of Lambeth, it's also going to make savages out of their feral offspring by the taint of Cain "cellular damage".

It's all very nineteenth century, isn't it?

Do you think she measured their heads for signs of savage inclinations, Pneumometer?

But yes - actually the rhetoric is very reminiscent of late 19th century writing about the East End: savagery, criminality, propensity to riot, abandoned children, etc etc. Much of it massively exaggerated, and which created a stigma that lingers more than a century later.

On the epigenetics question, there are two different things going on here, I think - CB wasn't so much talking about epigenetics (succinctly defined by Charis1 as "a mechanism by which the experiences in a woman's life turn genes in the eggs she is carrying on and off") as the idea that early neglect can permanently impair the ability of the child's brain to form the neural networks it needs to develop normal relationships and attachments. There is some evidence for the latter (notably in the case of the Romanian orphans) but it is contentious, and many experts think that damage caused by early neglect is reversible.

I think CB probably didn't understand the science very well (neither do I, I hasten to add) and almost certainly exaggerated the degree of certainty about it.

I am not an established expert in this field but it is on the periphery of my expertise. I said upthread that she appeared to have conflated a rather inaccurate understanding of epigenetics aka 'cellular damage' (whatever that is) with a limited reading of Bowlby's attachment theory.

The way she perceives the world, anyone who experiences severe misfortune is pretty much doomed without a raft of interventions. However we know this is not necessarily the case, from successes in treating things like PSTD with relatively limited CBT interventions, for example (I am sure there are many other examples).

It is all unproveable in any kind of robust way. There are far too may other variable factors in lives to pin it down to one or two. The conclusions are tenuous and outcomes for individuals will be affected by many things that happen in their lives- socio-economic factors, quality of education, intelligence- emotional and intellect, family support, aupportive relationships, health, never mind the actual academic rigour of the research in the first place.

Psychobabble that is used as rhetoric by the CBs of the world - hurled as facts to prove a 'truth' she wants to manipulate others to believe.

actually the rhetoric is very reminiscent of late 19th century writing about the East End

Quite: it's all very "othering". It's essentially arguing that large numbers of children in Lambeth and Southwark are being raised in circumstances so deprived, and by parents so dysfunctional, that comparisons with Romanian orphanages are valid. One would have thought that if not social services then schools would have noted the large numbers of Caspar Hauser-seque children speaking no language known to humanity arriving in their schools blinking from the darkness of the cellar, but these are the mysteries of CB-world.

The argument that there are communities in London which systematically and at scale abuse and neglect children through either their inherent stupidity or inherent evil is outrageous, and if CB wants to make it, she should stand up and do so (she hinted at it in her appalling comments about black mothers, but not to this degree). To have the volumes KC claimed, with the dysfunction CB claimed, this would have to be not Baby P-style edge cases, but a mainstream, core problem hidden from view for everyone not wearing appropriate magic robes. Which is, to be blunt, utter bullshit.

I am fascinated by this; having absolutely no knowledge at all, this thread is enlightening, informative and subsequentyly frightening.
I sincerely hope that CB and all those attached to/through her are thoroughly brought to account.
Without wanting to sound sickly sweet, this is Mumsnet at its best.
Thank you everyone and I shall keep reading with avid interest.

I wasn't thinking of epigenetics, I was thinking of studies that demonstrate that neglect can lead to higher inflammatory markers in adulthood, but this leads as much to physical illness as mental "The analysis demonstrates that childhood trauma contributes to a pro-inflammatory state in adulthood, with specific inflammatory profiles depending on the specific type of trauma." www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201567a.html

With regards to "massaging it out". I agree that KC does not sound like it had the conditions for this but, there is good evidence that pediatric massage reduces anxiety and a number of legitimate charities offer bodywork for adult survivors of sexual abuse.

Thus, as I said, good, useful, revealing research, now tainted by association with CB's speeches.

Also, as far as I know, Southwark does have 3x higher cases of psychosis than the national average.

Why are the psychosis rates so high there, does anyone know?

Why are the psychosis rates so high there, does anyone know?

There's work.

www.researchgate.net/publication/23448708_Raised_Incidence_Rates_of_All_Psychoses_Among_Migrant_Groups_Findings_From_the_East_London_First_Episode_Psychosis_Study

It's not just Southwark, but London more generally:

www.lho.org.uk/Download/Public/12217/1/MH%20London%20summary.pdf

www.psymaptic.org/prediction/psychosis-incidence-map-counties/ (warning, slow to load).

Think we have a DM journo reading www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214710/Why-does-Kids-Company-Camila-tell-tall-stories-life-troubling-investigation-reveals-colourful-acount-past-doesn-t-quite-add-up.html

Hah! I'd just come to post exactly the same link and observation Statistically.

Although, the journo does seem to have done some additional digging and turned up some further items of interest, eg a document at Companies House where she is described as a psychiatrist and her often-repeated tale of her father escaping Iran by swimming to Turkey when the two countries don't actually share a coastline.

That article is just lifted from this thread.

Even before all this came she long ago struck me as an egotistical, arrogant know-it-all. Very sure of herself and called upon as spokeswoman on a range of issues I thought had nothing to do with her. Maybe she was the "colourful personality". But Id be very surprised if she thought she had done anything wrong at all now. Her ego is too big its everybody else's fault not hers

Never heard of her before this came out! Or the charity!

Everything I have read makes her sound like a complete fantacist.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214710/Why-does-Kids-Company-Camila-tell-tall-stories-life-troubling-investigation-reveals-colourful-acount-past-doesn-t-quite-add-up.html

Even this bit sounds odd - Two years earlier, her student sister, Lila, committed suicide. At around the same time, Ms Batmanghelidjh says she was hospitalised with a pituitary gland disorder which left her close to death. 'Everyone on my ward died, except me,' she told the Evening Standard.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214710/Why-does-Kids-Company-Camila-tell-tall-stories-life-troubling-investigation-reveals-colourful-acount-past-doesn-t-quite-add-up.html#ixzz3k9xBXvrB
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I don't think we had picked up on the "I painted two pictures which won adult awards when I was just a child so I had to leave Iran for my education" claim