Mind the Child by Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company: Book #42 for 2013
Child psychologist Camila Batmanghelidjh opens her book with a powerful emotional punch, as she tells in the first paragraph of how when she was 14 her sister attempted suicide by jumping in front of a train.
Although this is part of a series of books dedicated to celebrating the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, this book uses the sense of a train journey as a metaphor for taking an emotional journey with the young people who contributed to this book. Camila is the founder of "Kids Company", a charity devoted to helping children from deprived backgrounds, and here she addresses the real-life issue of "underground children", who go unnoticed by most people in society.
Throughout the book, several teenagers involved with Kids Company tell their own stories, and it makes for very uncomfortable reading because of the harrowing subject matter. As I read the book, I felt that I was being educated on the very real issues of children being homeless because they ran away from their families, being neglected and abused, getting involved with drugs and gangs, and even forced into prostitution. The book even discusses in detail what effects physical abuse can have on the mental health of children.
While this book had almost nothing to do with the London Underground, except for a short account of a girl's journey on the underground where she talks about occasionally eating peoples' leftover food because she is homeless and hungry, I found this book to be compelling reading, and it does a very good of highlighting very serious issues that need to be addressed. There are a few moments where Camila seems to get up on her soapbox, mostly because of her anger that not enough is getting done about the issues she addresses, but overall I thought this was well-compiled and painstakingly researched.