Dignity out of Chaos
Imagine holding your hand between the pavement and a person's forehead as that person steadily seeks to beat the concrete with her own body, using physical pain to distract her from the intense emotional pain she carries. Imagine your earliest memory being your step-father hurling you against the wall, breaking your skull, your age just four years old, physical pain as nothing to the emotional scarring that act will leave.

These are just two occasions in the lives of young people when Camila Batmanghelidjh has had to draw on deep internal resources to respond effectively to their needs, to address their fragmenting sense of self, to help reassure them of being held in a compassion both vulnerable and robust.

However, this remarkable and moving book is not about Camila but about a small, representative cross-section of people who have come to her (and that of the organisations she has founded) for solace and for help. In a series of letters that Camila writes to them we learn the unfolding narrative of their lives, of how those lives were shattered by varying patterns of abuse and neglect; and, how, slowly, they were helped to piece together new possibilities and find ways forward out of often unimaginable difficulty. Each of these lives is unique but each is chosen to illuminate ways in which we might more effectively respond to the patterns of distress they reveal.

Take Daisy who grew up with a mother who had abdicated all care and responsibility for her children. Living in a house abandoned to squalor, Daisy at ten years old each night washes and irons her white school shirt in order to maintain her dignity, an island of self-respect in an environment that did everything to undermine it. The letter charts the ways in which Daisy responds to the shame her circumstances imposed on her and how that turned to anger and bad behaviour. It tells of how, rather than understand the causes of that behaviour, both educational and social services saw only the behaviour as the problem and instead of 'Daisy the vulnerable victim of a perversion of care' created 'Daisy the perpetrator of disruption' to be controlled if possible, banished if not. The letter tells of how with help ... both physical: a place to stay, and emotional ... Daisy was able to construct a life for herself that included both academic success and a relationship.

Each story is followed in turn by a section that explores, with great clarity, how those charged with responsibility of care for such children might deepen their understanding and more effectively respond.

One such section a chapter entitled 'Cradled in Terror: Children's Capacity to be Violent' is a masterpiece of clarity and concision in the way it charts early childhood development and the dynamic interaction between nature and nurture as our environment helps shape and mould our emotional capacities. It is fully illumined both by what recent research has helped us to know about this development and by therapeutic intelligence about how it might be applied in practice.

At heart the book gives Daisy and Chardonnay, Rocky and Mr Mason a voice to articulate the ways they have been failed ... and how ways may be found to transform that failure. As such the book is an indictment ... one it would be easy to read uncomfortably and finds reasons to reject. However to do so would be to evade our collective responsibility to create a society that does genuinely care, both for the rights of the child and for their uniqueness as persons, allowing them the space to flourish fully. But, more than this, the book has an intensely practical purpose of educating us to care; and, though our attention is held necessarily by the stories, our feelings transformed by them, what most impressed me is CamilaÕs ability to offer lucid recommendations for social and therapeutic practice. Care can only be as valuable as the intelligence as well as the compassion that informs it; and, this book compellingly offers both.

It should be read by everyone who cares.

Nicholas Colloff is the Country Programme Manager for Oxfam in Russia; and, a founding trustee of the Prison Phoenix Trust that provides spiritual accompaniment to those in prison.