Malnutrition in conflict: the psychological cause

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Children, conflict, despair, displaced, flashback, hopelessness, hypervigilant, infanticide, irritability, isolation, malnutrition, natural disasters, parents, post-traumatic stress, psychological support, recovery, signs, suicide, trauma, violence

Malnutrition in conflict: the psychological cause

Treating malnutrition in humanitarian crises, such as conflict and natural disaster, is far more complex than simply curing disease and providing children with therapeutic foods. Often, post-traumatic stress disorder – common in extreme situations – hinders treatment and its success. In Bangui, in the Central African Republic (CAR), the number of children suffering from life-threatening malnutrition has tripled since the outbreak of violence in December 2013.

Each month, 180 patients are being seen in a ward that initially had just 49 beds available for malnourished children. For many weeks, two to three patients – and their caregivers – were sharing single beds, increasing the risk of cross-infection of illness and delaying recovery.

The cause of severe acute malnutrition runs far beyond economic hardship and lack of food. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by fighting have been directly exposed to death threats, witnessed the deaths of neighbours or family members, and lost nearly all of their belongings. They are often exhausted by the harsh living conditions in camps.

75% of over 1,000 case studies of the parents of malnourished children collected by Action Against Hunger between July 2013 and March 2014 presented symptoms of post-traumatic stress linked to their exposure to extreme violence. The stress prompted behavioural changes, flashbacks, fatigue, isolation, excessive irritability, and feelings of hopelessness and despair.

These experiences also provoked reactions that – while understandable, normal, and usually temporary – can be disabling enough to impact a mother’s ability to nurse and feed her child. Nurses leading pre- and post-natal sessions with women in the 12 health centres around Bangui have reported that some mothers become convinced they cannot produce milk, or fail to respond to their child’s needs, resulting in early weaning that can be fatal for babies in an already challenging environment. In extreme cases, some mothers have attempted suicide and infanticide.

Children, while too young to fully understand what they have witnessed, may develop physical symptoms such as continuous crying, refusing to eat and bed wetting. Even small babies can present signs of trauma, such as feeding and sleep disturbances, continuous crying, and poor interaction. Not recognising the signs, some parents don’t make the connection and severely scold their children. To combat this, malnourished children and their carers are receiving psychological and social support.

At the nutritional therapeutic ward of Bangui’s main pediatric hospital, Action Against Hunger’s nutritional, psychological and social teams offer free treatment for severely malnourished children from a specialised counselling team. Feeding times, medical monitoring and psychological and motor activities pace the daily routine.

When Dieumerci Tsongbele, a single parent to his six-year-old daughter Jessica, arrived at the hospital, she had been refusing food and was not interacting with others. When he joined a welcoming session led by psychological and social experts, Tsongbele and other parents learned about factors that exacerbate malnutrition, including trauma. The information evoked an emotional response from the father, who had witnessed people killed. While he managed to escape the violence, the experience had left him unable to sleep, irritable and hypervigilant. Overwhelmed by the situation, he admitted he had been less attentive to his daughter’s needs.

During the programme, Tsongbele and the other parents participated in various activities with their children ranging from toy making to baby massage, which aim to provide both parents and children with a safe space to recreate natural and vital bonds that are essential for human development. Play sessions help to limit the negative effects of malnutrition strengthen parent-child relationships. Malnutrition treatment is not simply about filling stomachs, but also restoring the desire to eat.

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Stephanie Duvergé is a Action Against Hunger psychologist in the Central African Republic. Follow @ACF_UK on Twitter.

A third of first-time mothers suffer depressive symptoms, research finds

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baby, Children, Depression, depressive symptoms, diagnosis, early years, first-time mothers, four years postpartum, GPs, health professionals, health visitors, irritable, low mood, maternal health, mental health issues, midwives, mothers, new mothers, parents, Postnatal Depression, postpartum, pregnancy, risk, signs, tearful, training, worrying

A third of first-time mothers suffer depressive symptoms, research finds

One in three first-time mothers suffers symptoms of depression linked to their baby’s birth while pregnant and/or during the first four years of the child’s life, according to research.

And more women are depressed when their child turns four than at any time before that, according to the study, which challenges the notion that mothers’ birth-related mental struggles usually happen at or after the baby’s arrival.

The findings have led to calls for all women giving birth in the UK to have their mental health monitored until their child turns five to ensure that more of those experiencing difficulties are identified.

The results are based on research in Australia, but experts believe that about the same number of women in the UK experience bouts of mental ill-health associated with becoming a mother.

In all 1,507 women from six hospitals in Melbourne, Australia, told researchers from the Murdoch children’s research institute and royal children’s hospital in Parkville, Victoria, about their experience of episodes of poor mental health at regular intervals until their child turned four.

The authors found that almost one in three first-time mothers reported “depressive symptoms on at least one occasion from early pregnancy to four years postpartum [and that] the prevalence of depressive symptoms was highest at four years postpartum”. The women’s depressive symptoms are often short-lived episodes and do not mean that the women were diagnosed with postnatal depression. Studies in both the UK and internationally have estimated that between 10% and 15% of new mothers suffer from that clinical condition.

The researchers also found that four years after the child’s birth 14.5% display depressive symptoms, of whom 40% had not previously reported feeling very low. At that time, women with only one child were much more likely (22.9%) than those with two or more offspring (11.3%) to be depressed.

Dr Jim Bolton, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a consultant psychiatrist at a London hospital, said that one in three women giving birth in the UK were likely to become depressed at some point during those first four years. “If a similar study was done here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the results were similar. Usually the sorts of mothers who are at greater risk of depression are younger mothers who feel they can’t cope and mothers living in situations of adversity or deprivation or partner violence,” he said.

“These findings are about depressive symptoms, which can be very short-lived, not a formal diagnosis of illness or postnatal depression. This study isn’t saying that one in three women gets that,” stressed Bolton, who treats mental health problems in pregnancy and after birth among new mothers in his hospital’s women’s health unit.

The authors recommend that the UK overhauls its monitoring of maternal mental health, which focuses on pregnancy and the early years after birth, because more than half the women who experience depression after becoming a parent are not identified by GPs, midwives or health visitors.

More women could have postnatal depression than the usual estimate of 10%-15% partly because women may mistake the signs of it – which include being more irritable than usual or unusually tearful, inability to enjoy being a parent or worrying unduly about the baby’s health – as being things undergone by all new mothers.

Health professionals do not always spot it or ask the right questions to identify it, though are far more aware of it than ever, Bolton added.

One leading psychiatrist said that the one in three women who had depressive symptoms was between two and five times higher than the estimated number of people in the general population who would experience serious low mood in their lifetime, but was higher than the number of women who experienced the most severe forms of depression. Between 5%-10% of people generally suffer major/serious depression during their lifetime.The study, published in BJOG: An international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, is the first to follow a sizeable number of new mothers for as long as four years after birth. Elizabeth Duff, senior policy adviser at the parenting charity the NCT, said: “This study has included mothers for four years after birth, so suggests that perinatal mental health needs to be monitored for a longer period. Given the devastating effects of postnatal depression, health professionals should give equal consideration to the mental and physical health of parents with young children.”

A Department of Health spokeswoman said it welcomed any new research that would lead to women receiving better help with maternal depression.

“We want to do everything we can to make sure women and families get as much support as possible throughout pregnancy and beyond. That’s why, earlier this month, we announced that expert training in mental health will be rolled out for doctors and midwives to identify and help women who are at risk of depression or other mental health issues,” she said.

Numbers of midwives and health visitors have been growing under the coalition, while specialist mental health doctors and midwives will help improve earlier diagnosis of such problems, she added. However, the Royal College of Midwives said that even more midwives were needed to ensure mothers received the best possible care of their psychological welfare.

Nepal’s bogus orphan trade fuelled by rise in ‘voluntourism’

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child abduction, child trafficking, exploitation, orphanages, parents, tourists, volunteering, voluntourism

Nepal’s bogus orphan trade fuelled by rise in ‘voluntourism’

Like an increasing number of tourists visiting Nepal’s mountain peaks, colourful markets and lush national parks, Marina Argeisa wanted to experience the latest must-do activity on the tourist trail: a volunteering stint at an orphanage.

What the 26-year-old Spaniard did not know was that her good intentions were unwittingly feeding an industry that dupes poor parents into sending their children to bogus orphanages in order to extract money from well-meaning foreigners.

It is a business model built on a double deception: the exploitation of poor families in rural Nepal and the manipulation of wealthy foreigners. In the worst cases, tourists may be unwittingly complicit in child trafficking.

Nepal’s tourist sector comprises nearly 3% of its gross domestic product, and in 2012 more than 600,000 foreigners visited the tiny country.

Volunteering, or voluntourism as it is sometimes known, is a rapidly expanding industry. There are dozens of agencies offering the chance to spend weeks, or months, working at some of the country’s 800 orphanages.

More than 80% of these institutions are located in the most popular tourist hotspots: the ancient Kathmandu Valley; the trekking capital of Pokhara; and Chitwan, home to the largest national park. Child rights campaigners claim the country is also home to numerous unregistered orphanages.

Yet many of the occupants of these sites have at least one living parent. The latest investigation by Unicef, the UN’s children agency, found that 85% of children in the orphanages they visited had at least one living parent.

The trade in children begins in Nepal’s remote and impoverished countryside, where parents are tricked into sending their children to orphanages, often lured by the promise of an education.

Lojung Sherpa sent three of her children to the Happy Home orphanage in the capital after she was told that foreigners would educate them and raise money for one of her daughters, who has a serious medical condition. But when Sherpa spoke to her daughter some time later, she was told that all donations towards her treatment had been taken by the orphanage’s owner.

Sherpa travelled to Kathmandu to remove her children from the home but was repeatedly turned away. After an investigation, which resulted in the arrest of the orphanage owner on charges of child abduction and fraud, police officers discovered that Sherpa’s children were missing. The youngsters were later found at various locations across the city, where they had been hidden, and eventually reunited with their mother.

Philip Holmes, chief executive of Freedom Matters, the charity that instigated the inquiry into Happy Home, said that in the worst cases this practice constituted child trafficking.

“Once a child enters an orphanage, he or she seems to become the property of the orphanage owner … [In effect], they become prisoners of the orphanage,” he said. “[They] use the children as an income source, through the sponsorship of children who are presented as being orphans when they are not … and through the exploitation of overseas volunteers.”

When Dorota Nvotova, a young Slovakian, began volunteering at Happy Home in 2008, she was so moved by the children’s plight that she found a sponsor for every one of them. She raised about €150,000 (£122,000) for the home, but it was only later that she discovered the real reason its owner was so eager to attract foreign volunteers.

“It’s definitely about him making money. For him, it’s a business,” she said. “Whenever volunteers came he always tried to impress them and then they started fundraising for him.”

Argeisa admits that she too felt compelled to help the children of Nepal. During her search for a volunteering opportunity, it was the stories of the orphans profiled on the website of VolNepal, a Kathmandu-based agency, that attracted her attention.

She quickly signed up and paid $480 (£285) to spend four weeks looking after the children, but had no idea their profiles had been fabricated. “I couldn’t imagine there were people doing bad things to children and using the vulnerability of children to make money,” she said.

After strange behaviour at the orphanage aroused her suspicions about the home’s proprietor, Argeisa discovered that two sisters publicised as being orphans had living parents who had paid vast sums of money to a broker to send their children to the home to be educated.

And they were being educated, but at a cost far beyond anything her parents could imagine. The girls were being used to generate donations from tourists, with the orphanage claiming that their mother and father had abandoned them and no other relatives could be found.

“These little girls are very important for the owner of the home to get money. This is the only reason that they want these children,” Argeisa said. “They are [being] used.”

After one of the sisters confessed that she was being sexually abused by the owner, Argeisa reported the allegations to a local children’s organisation, Action for Child Rights (ACR). The owner of the orphanage was subsequently arrested for attempted rape.

“This was very, very hard … I couldn’t stop my feelings against that man,” Argeisa said. “I think his mission was making money … and abusing children … He wouldn’t have set up the home if there were no westerners coming and giving money and doing volunteering.

“The foreigners do not realise what is happening because they [orphanage owners] are specialists in stopping people from seeing the dark side. There are many people living for six months in an orphanage and they don’t realise this, because these children are scared … These houses are jails for these children.”

This is not an exceptional case, says Jürgen Conings, general director of ACR, who has spent 10 years in Nepal investigating the nexus between foreigners, adoption agencies and orphanages. “I’m 100% sure that the majority of these homes are built for reasons other than childcare,” he said. “Foreign volunteers give a home credibility … and they pay to volunteer, so it’s a strong business model.”

A report by Tourism Research and Marketing estimates that volunteer tourism attracts 1.6 million people a year, and that the market is worth up to £1.3bn.

While there are no reliable figures about the scale of voluntourism in Nepal, Martin Punaks, country director of Next Generation Nepal, which reunites orphanage-trafficked children with their families, believes it is a growing industry. “There is the potential for huge profits to be made for those who intentionally and unnecessarily displace children from their families, so they can be used as lucrative poverty commodities to raise funds from well-intentioned but ill-informed tourists,” he said.

The government recognises the problem but is struggling cope with the scale of it. “These children are a showpiece [for fundraising], but no one knows how much the owner gets and how much goes to the children,” said Tarak Dhital, executive director of the Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB). “We have introduced minimum standards for children’s homes and we need to strengthen our monitoring systems, but haven’t been able to till now … we lack financial and human resources.”

The CCWB is responsible for regulating orphanages in Nepal, but there are serious questions about its capacity to do so. According to its latest report, 90% of children’s homes failed to meet the government’s minimum operating standards.

However, Conings cautioned against the blanket condemnation of Nepalese orphanages. “A lot of good things are done; a lot of NGOs and social workers are doing an amazing job,” he said. “We would never say it’s not good [to volunteer], but we want to bring this to the public’s attention. There is a positive and negative, so be aware and make good decisions.”

But Nvotova questions the premise of volunteering at an orphanage. “[Foreigners] feel cool by doing this,” she said. “But I think it’s more selfish than useful. Very often [volunteers] don’t want to see the truth. They just want to feel needed and useful.”

• Some names have been changed

Old enough to know better: how teenagers cope with a parent’s cancer

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adolescents, Cancer, Children, communication, family, information, parents, responsibility, teenagers, young people

Old enough to know better: how teenagers cope with a parent’s cancer

My daughter Maya is in the family room watching TV. I’m heading out to buy ginger sweets for my wife, Marsha, who’s upstairs in bed, feeling queasy after her latest round of chemotherapy.

“Going to get something for Mum; be right back,” I call to my 15-year-old.

“How is she doing?” asks Maya.

In my head, I think: “Why don’t you ask her yourself since she is just one flight of stairs away!” But I bite my tongue. I don’t want to add to the tension that cancer has already brought to our home.

Looking back, I realise that Maya wasn’t the only family member to avoid direct communication during the seemingly endless months of treatment for Marsha’s breast cancer. Consumed with all things cancer, my wife and I never asked her and her younger sister, Daniela, who was 13 at the time: “How are you doing?”

Many families find themselves in a similar situation: parent with cancer, teens in the house, not a lot of cross-generational conversation. Tens of thousands of children live with a parent who is a cancer survivor. Roughly a third of those children are 13 to 17 years old. While parents pay a lot of attention to the needs of younger kids, they may figure, as we did, that teens are old enough to cope.

“Adolescents are an unheard group,” says Shara Sosa, an oncology counsellor. Unfortunately, the nature of adolescence fights against openness of any kind, never mind the cancer in the family.

“With their kids locked behind a mask of teen indifference, parents are often intimidated and don’t know how to talk to them,” Ms Sosa says.

Teenagers are pulling away from the family, forging their own identity. The news that a parent has cancer yanks the adolescent back into the fold – exactly where they don’t want to be.

The reaction of a teen to a parent’s illness varies widely. Some respond with a disappearing act: after-school activities, shopping trips, sleepovers, you name it, they’ll do it to avoid the uncertain environment at home. It doesn’t mean they don’t love and care about the parent with cancer – it’s just their way of dealing with it all, says Maureen Davey, a family therapy Professor at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions, in Philadelphia.

Does that mean these kids are likely to turn to risky behaviour? Mental-health experts say that there are no data to quantify this and emphasise that most of the teens they work with do not act out. Yet typical teen temptations are always present.

Of the 100-plus teens who my daughter Maya and I interviewed for a book we wrote about teens and parental cancer, around 10 per cent confessed that they’d turned to drinking, drugs or vandalism as coping mechanisms.

Elissa Bantug, who was 12 when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 21 years ago, felt as if her mother had abandoned her. She drank, hooked up with an older boyfriend and forged her mother’s name 36 times on notes to get out of school. When the school asked her mother to come in for a conference, she felt too exhausted from her cancer treatments to turn up.

It’s impossible to say if Elissa would have acted out if her mother had been well. Still, looking back as an adult, Elissa says: “I felt like no one really talked to me.”

And she had lots of questions: would her mother be OK? What does it mean to be a cancer survivor? How would their family life change in the short run and the long run? Her rebellion, she says, was sparked by a lack of information.

Others respond by defying their developmental stage, assuming responsibilities that normally fall to the parents. Out of sync with their peers, these kids sometimes talk about their real age and their “cancer age”.

“I’m 16, and I have to act like I’m 40,” a teenager named Lyndsey told me. While her mother is in treatment for breast cancer, she says, “I have to cook, clean, make sure my mum eats, my brothers are fed.”

A “parentified” teen will inevitably feel frustrated. Teens may be “angry they have to take over everything and nobody appreciates that they’re doing so much more than they used to,” says psychiatrist Karen Weihs, medical director for supportive care at the University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson.

Stacy Hoover, a single mother, learned she had breast cancer when her daughters were 13 years old, and 18 months. She leaned on the older daughter, Megan, which took a toll. “Sometimes I wanted to go over to a friend’s house, but I didn’t want to leave my mum with the baby,” Megan recalls. When chemo made her mother irritable, Megan says: “It was hard not to yell back.”

No matter how the teenager responds, the parents can help shape the child’s frame of mind. That means sharing information, regardless of whether the news is good or bad.

Indeed, several studies establish the value of honest communication above all. Medical psychologist Stacey Donofrio looked at nearly 300 adolescents in the Netherlands who were coping with a parent’s cancer. She found that “the intensity of the parent’s treatment” for illness was not as important in influencing adolescent reactions as the way parents talked to the kids about it.

“Adolescents may feel especially uncertain if they feel their parents are not being entirely open,” she said.

Such an information gap elevated the tensions for Jackie Shmauch, a teenager whose father had leukaemia. One night, the 14-year-old fled her home in tears after eavesdropping on a call from her father’s oncologist. Jackie thought her father’s leukaemia was in remission, but she overheard a discussion of a bone-marrow transplant. After her parents found her at a friend’s house, they explained that the transplant was a preventive measure, not a sign that the cancer was back. That’s when Jackie delivered her ultimatum: “If there is information you have and you think you shouldn’t tell Jackie, that’s what I want you to tell me.”

Yet not every teen is like Jackie.

“If your child says, ‘Talking about this with you is not helpful to me’, it’s important to respect that,” says child psychiatrist Paula Rauch, who directs the Marjorie E Korff PACT Program (Parenting at a Challenging Time) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

It is critical for parents to remember that, cancer or no cancer, they still need to keep an eye on their teenagers – no easy task, especially when one of the parents is ill. The key, Ms Sosa points out, is listening closely even though “your head is in so many different places” because of the cancer diagnosis. That means asking follow-up questions, even challenging your teenager at times. If teens know you’re truly paying attention, she says, “they’re going to tell you all sorts of things”.

Some teenagers may just need a break from all the care-giving – perhaps by having other family members or friends shoulder the young person’s chores from time to time.

“Just to be 12 again, that was really quite a blessing,” recalls Bailee Richardson, now 19, who cared for her two younger sisters while her mother was being treated for breast cancer and her stepfather was working out of town.

A decade after my wife’s diagnosis, Marsha is in good health, but she and I are just beginning to understand how the experience affected our daughters. Maya tells me how uneasy she was with her mother’s bald head, courtesy of chemo, and that she found relief from the free-floating cancer anxiety that infiltrated our home by turning to friends, even if they didn’t quite understand what she was going through. And she’s sorry she didn’t help out more.

I, too, was sorry she didn’t step up. But I made the mistake of assuming that Maya and her sister could read my mind. I once exploded when my daughters didn’t rush to my aid as I dragged in bags of groceries after a day of errands.

“Can’t you give me a hand?” I yelled.

Maya calmly said: “We’d be happy to if you’d ask us.”

Lack of support for parents who live in fear of their teenagers, study shows

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domestic violence, parenting, parents, shame, stigma, support, teenage violence, Teens, violence

Lack of support for parents who live in fear of their teenagers, study shows

Parents living in fear of their abusive and violent teenagers are being left without support because of a lack of understanding of adolescent violence directed at parents, according to the first academic study into the issue.

Data from the Metropolitan police revealed that there were 1,892 reported cases of 13- to 19-year-olds committing violence against their own parents in Greater London alone over a 12-month period from 2009-10.

Dr Rachel Condry, lead researcher at the University of Oxford, which carried out the study, said there was little support for parents in such circumstances from police, youth justice teams or other agencies.

“The problem has, until now, gone largely unrecognised, which can mean that parents can find it very difficult to get help,” she said.

“The parents we spoke to said they were stigmatised and felt ashamed – they were experiencing patterns of controlling behaviour that were similar to domestic violence. One woman told us she would get up in the middle of the night to make her teenager dinner because she feared the consequences if she didn’t; others talked about walking on eggshells.”

Britain’s incoming director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, warned last month that teenage violence in the home was a hidden aspect of domestic violence: “There is a lack of respect and a lack of regard for authority. When I was growing up the thought of striking a parent was beyond the pale. Is that peers? Is that TV? Is that the general environment in the house? You are not born to commit domestic violence.”

Nicola, a mother in West Yorkshire who did not want to be named, said her daughter first started to behave violently towards her when she was 13. “She’d push me, punch me, lose her temper and smash the house up – it got to the stage where I was scared stiff,” she said.

“I thought it was me, my mothering skills. People were asking me why I couldn’t control her, but what was I supposed to do? Beat her up?”

Nicola was sent on a parenting course, but felt there was no one to help her. “I’ve got three other kids and none of them were like this – it wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said.

The study, co-authored by Caroline Miles, found that 87% of suspects in the London study were male and 77% of victims were women, although fathers could feel more reluctant to report the issue, said Condry.

The study found that, in the reported cases analysed, 60% of victims were classified as white European, while 24.3% were African-Caribbean. It says: “Families reporting adolescent-to-parent violence are likely to be at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale”.

Of those who recorded a profession, 46.7% were unemployed, 11.6% described themselves as housewives, while 3.4% were teachers and 2.9% were nurses.

Condry said it was a problem that could hit families in any demographic. “It is not the fact of being a single parent that is causing this issue, but parenting an adolescent is difficult and perhaps if a parent is on their own there is more potential for things to go awry.” The study found that a range of issues, including exposure to domestic violence, peer influence, mental health issues and drug problems had played a role, but there was no one reason for adolescent violence against parents.

“There may be issues around what we think of as poor parenting but many families we spoke to did not have those type of histories – that is uncomfortable for society, but we have to get a handle on the complexity of this issue,” she said.

When asked what she thought had provoked her daughter’s behaviour, Nicola said: “She has always seen me dominated, but I’m having counselling now and I’m starting to stand up for myself.”

Eventually she got support from the Rosalie Ryrie Foundation, a charity that deals with family violence. “They were fantastic; they showed me different techniques and it’s much better – she still loses her temper but she’s not as violent,” she said.

“It’s hard to ask for help. Other people should remember that it’s easy to say stand up to them, but it’s much more difficult when you are in that position.”

Condry said: “We want our victims to be entirely blameless. We think parents should be in control of their own children – but this is not an issue that can simplistically be blamed on bad parenting.”

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

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abuse, Children, dissociation, family, parents, relationships, sexual exploitation, support, Trafficking, trauma

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once they had arrived, they waited for another couple to arrive with their own child.

“Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?” her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the cafe upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.

It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American north-west to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 70s and 80s.

Her father, precariously self-employed after losing his teaching job, was violent towards her younger brother, but since she had become the family breadwinner, Raven was granted a peculiar status. “My father always favoured me because I brought in the money – I was supporting our whole family. My younger brother was jealous because of my dad’s special treatment of me.

“My father was also quite affectionate towards me whereas he would beat my brother to a pulp. Although he did hit me, he wanted me to stay intact because the less scars I had, the more I was worth.”

Inevitably, as she grew older, Raven’s value to her abusers decreased and subsequently the kinds of films she was required to take part in became more extreme and violent.

Yet from a young age, she had learned from her parents to rationalise and deny what was going on within the family. “It’s the same way that someone who has a problem with alcohol will rationalise their behaviour – ‘It’s only this many drinks. It’s before noon but, oh well, just today’.

“I remember my mother saying things like, ‘Oh, they’ll never remember it,’ like people do when they get their babies’ ears pierced. I told myself that my parents meant well, that what I was going through was what was necessary to help my family. It was paying our mortgage.”

As we sit talking in a central London cafe, there are two large suitcases on the floor next to us, both full of puppets she has made. A graduate of the puppetry course at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, Raven turned to this artform as a way of telling her story without the gaze of an audience focusing on her directly – something she finds too uncomfortable.

Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation and trafficking to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen “somewhere else, to someone else”. She moved to the UK to create Hooray for Hollywood, an autobiographical play in which the children are represented by puppets, while the adults – their parents – are only shown up to waist height, from a child’s eye view. This critically acclaimed drama has toured the UK, Poland and France, and has been made into a film.

One of the most shocking aspects of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ conversation, as they rationalise the choice they have just made to sell their children, from the cosy confines of a cafe. These appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters or weirdos, but the kind of people who might be your nextdoor neighbours.

“You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images – whose children are they? How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been traumatised or damaged by what happened?”

Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven recently launched a national campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse. She now uses the film of Hooray for Hollywood for public education and training for professionals working in social services, education, law enforcement and children’s charities.

The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse. Child abuse is such a taboo subject, and the concept of parents being complicit in the crime so unthinkable, that frequently there is a failure to recognise that it might be going on. Yet since Raven’s childhood, the internet has led to an explosion in the industry, which now has a worldwide market value of billions of dollars, according to the UN.

Britain’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre, a division of the police, says the number of indecent images of children in circulation on the internet runs into millions, with police forces reporting seizures of up to 2.5m images in single collections alone, while the number of individual children depicted in these images is likely to be in the tens of thousands. The commonest way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.

A report by the NSPCC highlighted the particular psychological suffering that children who have been sexually abused within the child abuse industry endure, especially through the knowledge that there is a permanent record of their sexual abuse: “There is nothing they can do about others viewing pornographic pictures or films of themselves, and sometimes their coerced sexual abuse of others, indefinitely.”

For Raven, the psychological effects of her abuse have been extreme. From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. “I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: OK, we don’t look in that room,” she says. “When there’s no relief, there’s no one stepping in to save you, and it’s clear you’re just going to have to endure something, then your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a serious survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.”

It was at the age of 15 that the coping mechanisms of denial and dissociation began to break down. “At school, I started getting flashbacks – like remembering being in a warehouse the night before – and I could feel in my body it was true, but it was terrifying because I didn’t want those things to be true.”

Astonishingly, she passed through most of school without anyone picking up on what was happening at home. “I got good marks at school, so teachers tended to think everything was fine. Most survivors I’ve known who experienced extreme abuse did very, very well at school, actually, because that was their sanctuary, a place they could go to be safe.”

Eventually, however, a teacher noticed that Raven was getting thinner. Her mother, by now separated from her father but still facilitating the abuse, had simply stopped buying food for her. “The teacher invited me to stay after school and talk with her one day, and she asked, ‘Tell me the truth, are you anorexic? Bulimic?’ And I started laughing.”

Raven confided some but not all of what was happening at home, but begged the teacher not to report it for fear of reprisals. What the teacher did do, however, was to help her find the wherewithal to move out of home eventually, get a job in a restaurant, and start saving up for college.

At university, Raven finally made a break from her family, changed her name and started to get counselling – the beginning of a long road to recovery that still continues. “I got into a support group for rape survivors, and it was a great help because all of a sudden I was around other people healing from abuse, too. It also gave me some perspective about how the things that had happened to me were really on the extreme end. I saw people completely devastated by one experience of being raped by a stranger, so it was sobering to realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been raped by hundreds of people.'”

Once she was in a safe environment, finally the rage about what had happened to her bubbled to the surface. “I couldn’t believe how angry I was when I first escaped – so angry. In one support group they let us take a baseball bat to a punching bag and told us to think about a specific abuse event and imagine that we were fighting back against it, and that was very helpful.”

She also saw an integrative bodywork therapist, who used touch, guided movement and vocal expression. “Her premise was that post-traumatic stress is a physical reaction in your body, and that reconnecting the symptom to the source helps you let it go, helps you release it, and that you don’t have to talk out every single thing that ever happened to you. It was very helpful for me because there were a lot of strange things that my body was doing. For example, I used to find any kind of physical touch excruciating – even if someone brushed me in the street I would shudder. She told me that was called armouring, which happens when your body makes a shield out of its muscles to protect the bones and internal organs during physical abuse.”

The therapy made it possible for her to move on and start to enjoy life. “I realised that it is possible to get your life back. I started to gain an appreciation for life and a recognition that I only have so many breaths, so I’ve got to use them well.”

But Raven believes she will always need counselling and that her experiences have made it difficult not to fall into a pattern of emotionally abusive romantic relationships.

Perhaps surprisingly, sex has not been a significant issue, but love is inextricably connected for her with betrayal, as the people who were meant to love her most as a child were the ones who orchestrated her abuse.

Yet, incredibly, she says she felt love for her parents as a child and still does, although she has cut all contact with them. Despite their behaviour, she believes they did love her.

“When I screen my film, a lot of times in the Q&A session afterwards people want to know: how could parents do this to their own children? I tell them that abuse is generational: my parents were also abused themselves, so that was normal to them. They had dissociated in the same way I did; they were in denial. Unlike my generation, they didn’t have access to counselling when they were young, and weren’t born in a time when child abuse was beginning to be acknowledged by society. It’s important to recognise that they weren’t born evil – they were damaged.”

Raven thinks that the way in which child abusers such as Jimmy Savile are demonised is counterproductive. “Demonising the perpetrators elevates them to the realm of the surreal. We need to shift that, so people recognise that they are very sick humans and that there’s a context for their crimes.

“Only then can we tackle the source of this suffering.”

 Outspiral.org.uk

When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

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anxiety, change, Children, dynamics, empty nest syndrome, family, home, parents, relationships, siblings, students, transition, university, withdrawn

When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

It’s five years since my eldest child left home, but now it’s that time of year again, the shops filled with students buying value sets of crockery and stationery, harassed parents doing the Ikea run. I’m reminded of one of the most unexpected sides to our so-called emptying nest.

When my youngest child, seven years old at the time, became cowed with anxiety by day and unable to sleep at night, I thought at first it had something to do with his new class at primary school. It was a few weeks into the start of a school year, and our previously robust youngest had undergone a massive character change. He had been outgoing but was now withdrawn. He had been a joker; now nothing made him laugh. He started wanting reassurance at night.

It took days of probing to get to the root of the problem. No, he liked his new teacher. Yes, his friendships were all fine. When he admitted, reluctantly, that since his sister left home, it had felt to him as if a piece of the family was missing, I was dumbstruck. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that her leaving would make such a strong impact on him, especially as one sister was still at home.

“Every time I see any of the things she’s left behind, I feel upset,” he tried to explain.

At bedtime, he used to find the music and background chatter from his sisters’ rooms comforting. When one or both of them were out, he knew they would be there later. Now that the eldest had left, for good, as he saw it, he simply couldn’t get to sleep or think about anything but the gap that was left.

Empty nest syndrome is pretty well documented. Parents may well experience feelings of either grief or exuberance – a step towards regaining their freedom – as their brood take their first steps into the big wide world, but it hadn’t occurred to me to pay attention to the effect on her siblings when our first-born left.

On reflection, it seems obvious – even when other siblings remain at home, the departure of one of them affects family dynamics. Relationships shift and alter the way they have to adjust when a new baby is born, with roles altering and pecking orders changing. But there is no “empty nest” label for siblings to attach to their confused feelings, particularly those who are very young (the gap between our youngest and his 18-year-old sister perhaps exacerbated the problem), and my son, unable or unwilling to articulate his sense of loss, was suffering anxiety and sleeplessness instead. I suspect, with the instinctive perception of children, that he might also have avoided telling me why he was affected for fear of upsetting me – I may have mentioned how quiet the house seemed without the eldest or that I missed her, and he picked up some of that and didn’t want to make things worse.

Now I thought about it, I realised that her departure meant that other things had changed in the household, which must have felt unsettling to a young child. Our middle daughter, 16 at the time, had started going out more with her friends, and one or the other of us parents was usually preoccupied with work or study. The house became a place to sleep rather than the family home it had been. With only four of us, rarely all at home at once, we hardly ever gathered for family meals any more. We used to sit and watch TV or films together; now we never did.

What message had this given to our youngest? That it wasn’t worth the effort just for him?

The change must have felt catastrophic. Our first-born leaving was poignant for her parents. It was the end of an era, but it also meant we were embarking on a path that would eventually lead us back to living a child-free life again, to which in some ways we were looking forward.

For our youngest child, who had never known life without his older sister, the change was far more significant. It was uncharted and so potentially scary. It must also have felt final – he had no idea, as we did, that students come scurrying back home every holiday and often in between. As far as he was concerned, if one person could just leave, who was going to disappear next?

But all siblings are affected. Our 16 year old had lost a confidante and ally. The silence in the house was conspicuous now that the two girls’ gossip and summary of their day no longer took place nightly in their room. And, indeed, my middle daughter says it was a difficult transition for her too. “I felt really upset, driving away from her,” she admits. “And I missed her a lot,” she says.

The difference between her and the youngest was that she was able to express her feelings and fill the gap by increasing her social life and endlessly messaging her sister. But the result was that she too edged away from home, leaving the house all the emptier for her younger brother.

Once I began to think about the whole issue of siblings leaving, I remembered that when my elder brother went off on his travels, it catapulted me into adulthood. I was left at home with my younger brother, who at that stage seemed much less exciting, and I was lost. Who would I go to parties and gigs with now? My younger brother (who may also, like my youngest son, have had unexpressed feelings himself) withdrew into his room as he hit puberty, my mother returned to full-time work and my father was out more. When I got in from school, the house was silent, cold and tomb-like. I couldn’t wait to leave and made sure I did, as soon as I could.

Home was no longer the place of solace it had once seemed. Because, of course, accompanying the emotional changes when a child leaves, are economic and practical ones. Parents have to support their older kids through university and may take the opportunity – as mine did – to work more hours, in the process leaving the younger ones behind. The conflict is one I recognise only too well, as the need to earn more to support my older children through further education has been pitted against the responsibility of being around for the younger one. When you’ve been a parent for 18-plus years, it’s easy to feel that it’s time to ease off when they start to leave home, and to give yourself a bit of a break, pursuing interests you may have had to shelve during the child-rearing years, but younger children may feel – and indeed be – sidelined as a result.

There is also an effect on the parents’ relationship. Couples who have worked at staying together “for the sake of the kids”, may give up making the effort once there are fewer kids at home. A friend, the mother of two adult daughters, recounts: “We managed to hold our relationship together while the older one was at home, even though it wasn’t going well. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now I see there was a link between her leaving and our relationship ending. It wasn’t conscious, but it was there. I worry now that my younger daughter must have felt she didn’t matter as much as the older one because we held it together for her sister, but not for her!”

In the years since our first daughter left for university, she has been back to live at home and moved out again. The middle child has also left, but I made more of an attempt to be aware of how her brother may feel, and to remind him that her “leaving” didn’t mean she was disappearing for ever. But by then he was older and knew that such changes aren’t finite anyway.

There are, of course, advantages to a sibling leaving. Younger children have a chance to try on new identities, to expand into the space left, to have their own room – for the first time in some cases – to take on new roles, and, potentially, to grow closer to other siblings or their parents. My son is 13 now and reaping the benefits of having siblings who have left home. “It was difficult when I was little,” he says. “But now they’re living in London it’s like I’ve got a second home,” he says.

For me, it was a salutary lesson in how strong the bond between my own children really was and how much more sensitive I should have been to the change a child leaving would make to her siblings in the first place. It seemed to me that my children became closer when they started living apart, but perhaps, and more likely, it was simply that I hadn’t realised how close they had always been. We are often the worst witnesses to what is in front of our noses within the family. I am also aware that while for us, the parents, it was a step towards a couple-only lifestyle, for my youngest, life really would never be the same again.

Perhaps these two recollections from friends best illustrate the sense of the gap that can be left when a sibling leaves home. “My sisters shared an attic bedroom just above my room. When they’d both left, I used to lie in bed aware of, and terrified by, the dark, empty hole that was left. I loved it at Christmas when they came home and that dark hole filled with the light and noise of their presence again.”

Another friend, who shared a room with her older sister, recalls how when she left home she wondered who she was going to talk to at night. “I found it devastating when my sister left, and I used to carry on the conversations I would have been having with her when she was there,” she says. “For months after she left, I just kept on talking to an empty bed.”

I really didn’t like my son

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Children, family, parenting, parents

I really didn’t like my son

“Get inside the house!” I say, in a low growl, which I hope the neighbours can’t hear.

“No,” replies George.

“Listen, you brat” – tempers are frayed – “I know I promised a trip to the ice-cream place, but Auntie died two days ago and we are too upset, too busy. We’ll go another time.”

In the emotional-manipulation game, I’ve played my trump card. Now George plays his: “I don’t give a fuck that Auntie died.”

I stare at my eldest child, who meets my apoplectic gaze with blank defiance, and the thought hits me like a saucepan to the head: I don’t like you.

How did we get to this?

George is 10 and reminds me of Two-Face in Batman. He has a capacity for gentleness, is kind, generous and sensitive at heart. Yet his innate goodness – that soft, precious side – is these days mostly hidden beneath an arrogant, flinty exterior. His teacher likes his intelligence and wit, but confesses that her assistant finds him cocky and rude.

I agree. I feel a gouging ache of despair, even though I know that if I question him, he’ll be indignant and exclaim that the assistant always, unfairly, blames him when it’s the girls’ fault. And, immediately, I hate the assistant, for not understanding him, for her ignorant sexism (when he was a reluctant reader, she cemented the problem by forcing him through Eva, The Enchanted Ball Fairy). But mostly, I hate her because her attitude towards my darling son is uncomfortably reminiscent of my own.

So often, George seethes with latent rage and the tiniest imperfection will cause an eruption – last night, a too squashy satsuma. He is ferociously competitive and often casually cruel to his young brother – elbowing him on the stairs, so that the poor child flinches every time he passes his tormentor. He reaches extremes of emotion in seconds, screaming, crying, hurling books or balls across the room. It’s frightening because he is easily as strong as I am.

Recently, he called his father a bastard for forbidding him to watch South Park. If I’d spoken to my parents like that, I told George, I’d have been hit across the room. “And would that have been right?” enquired my son coolly.

I’m not Zen enough to always remain impassive when provoked. I don’t want to be a parent who hits, but I have grabbed George roughly, scratching his arm, to prevent him attacking his brother. I apologised with the weasel caveat, “Listen to me, then I won’t have to physically restrain you.”

My son isn’t stupid. He senses my fleeting dislike and it is poisoning our relationship. I lurch between futile forgiveness and condemnation. If we ban him from his favourite sport as punishment, we fuel his anger. The penal system is not a deterrent. But if we talk ourselves hoarse, he barely listens. Or he might cry, feel contrite, submit to a cuddle, then revert to venom and violence the instant he’s tested.

After 10 years of instinctive, cack-handed, self-analytical mothering, it strikes me I have no idea what to do.

It doesn’t help that on some pathetic level, I goad myself that this was inevitable; dysfunction rumbling miserably down through generations. I was a child who meekly obeyed autocratic parents: I never, ever answered back. My own mother shouted and hit. She was perpetually sour and incandescent with fury at the smallest infringement. Do I secretly resent my son, for his ingratitude, for the happy but exasperating fact that he isn’t afraid of his mother?

Of course my son cares about Auntie but I willfully choose to take him at his silly word and have a fight about it. Meanwhile, George derives grim satisfaction from watching me lose it. He is spoilt – not materially – but he often gets his way. I don’t know what I should deal with: the insolence or its cause – why is he like this?

Mostly, I fear I know. Stress and grief mean his father and I are a-boil with tension. All my unprocessed anger towards other people has accumulated into one bristling ball. Only at home do I give vent. My 10-year-old has seen me stamp and shout. He has absorbed this anger and thrown it back at me.

Yet I’m not like my mother: I cuddle, comfort, praise my children, and can’t hugely care when the light fitting is hit by a tennis ball. But her shadow remains and my reflex reactions are sometimes hers. I speak in her voice: “Get a move on! Pick up your feet!” That harshness is within me.

As I argue with my son in the street, I wonder if I possess the mental strength to be a parent. Perhaps because of my upbringing, my confidence evaporated when the hospital staff let me take this baby home. I was glad to have a part-time nanny, relieved to hand over my son to a professional. I was scared of him; his need for me was so great, I was terrified of failing him. I managed the practical stuff: steamed his organic carrots, overdressed him, read him Elmer. But I connected warily.

Eventually, you must stop excusing your failures, and take responsibility for your attitude and actions. My approval is certainly conditional but when does that spill over into withholding love? We spend a lot of time with our son – some quality, some purgatory. I often wish I worked in an office: despite the home-cooked meals, taxiing to various sports, the reading together, familiarity breeds contempt.

I am critical, correcting him on his table manners 10 times in one sitting. I discipline him supposedly for his good, but also for mine. He is a frequent, casual loser of coats, which maddens me. I am not always accepting of the child I’ve got.

As I start to write this, venting my frustration, each word feels like a betrayal of a small boy who should trust me. My sister-in-law says: “He tries so hard to please you – he always looks to you for approval.”

What she says resonates. I’m so desperate to change the situation that over the following months, I force myself to be warm, tolerant, minimise blame, smile – even when I want to yell my head off, like when he methodically picks the stuffing out of the dining-room chair.

I also consult Gaynor Sbuttoni, an educational psychologist who specialises in emotional issues. She says that as a parent, I must see that I come second. I must allow him to be angry, look for a solution, but limit the behaviour. Tell him: “You can’t hurt anyone, you can’t hurt yourself and you can’t break things. But you can stomp and shout and get your anger out and when it’s over we’ll carry on and we’ll do the right thing.”

Sbuttoni adds, “With most children, anger is covering up their anxiety. If he was feeling you didn’t like him – how scary is that? If your mum can’t love you unconditionally, nobody can.”

At last I recognise what is happening. I also see that I am not a victim of his behaviour; I have the power to stop it.

I comment on his every good deed: “That was kind of you, to read to your brother.” I try to promote intimacy. I have a foolish reticence, as if by pushing myself close, I’m interfering. At heart, I’m scared of his rejection. But when I join him in the garden to play, he is so pleased and surprised I feel ashamed for holding back. He blushes with delight when I attempt to fast-bowl.

I give him credit. I recognise that we expect a lot of him and work on recognising his vulnerabilities.

Sbuttoni explains: “A boy, developing emotionally, is fraught with pain. On the outside they are supposed to be big and strong and tough – inside they’ve got real feelings and are trying to cover them up, understand them – and many people do not acknowledge that with boys. It’s still hard for a boy to talk about feelings and when he has an adult who allows him to, there is friction inside: ‘I can do all this talking but when I get with the gang, I have to be angry, abusive and aggressive so that the male community will accept me as a male.’

“All kids are struggling with so much at any one time and Mum is the one they test it all out on,” she says.

My power to do good or evil is thrown into sharp relief by her words – and with it, my huge responsibility. I also see, with far greater clarity and compassion, his position. When George does explode with frustration, instead of snapping, I charm away his bad temper. I find this supremely difficult. When he swears, I say, “Please don’t speak like that.” I don’t stoop to a squabble. I even – as Sbuttoni advises “stand there, as if you are a gorilla over him” – to indicate on important issues that while he is as powerful as me, I am in charge. But mostly I try to put my ego aside and see it his way. When I help him with an essay, he asks, “Were you the cleverest person at English in your year at university?”

“God, no!” I say. “There were a lot of naturally brilliant people there. I just tried hard.”

He says, “I think it’s far better to try hard and do well, than to be clever and not try.”

“You’re right, George,” I say. “Thank you,” and he beams.

I feel a great rush of love. Because he’s so eloquent, it’s easy to mistake his for an adult mind, to roar, “Oh, grow up!” when he plays the fool or needles me. I am a difficult parent: disorganised, grumpy, sarcastic and unfair. Yet he loves me, as I do him, with painful, primal ferocity. I see I just had to learn to try harder.

Names have been changed

An expert opinion

Is it common not to like your child? It’s difficult to know as it’s such a taboo subject that people won’t readily admit to it. We are supposed to love our children from the minute they are born, like magic, and if that doesn’t happen you can feel you are stumbling from the start.

While it’s perfectly normal to find your child annoying occasionally, or dislike aspects of him or her, not liking them long term can usually be traced back to a reason, or sometimes several. There might have been a rupture in the bonding process. Sometimes children remind the parent of parts of themselves that they don’t like. Or they find it hard to cope with a child’s extreme vulnerability.

How you were parented can also have an impact: if you had a really difficult relationship with your mother (or father if you are a man), it can be really difficult to know how to be a good version of a mother/father yourself.

What is damaging for children is if they can’t get back to a place where they know the parent really does love them – in other words, if there’s never a time at which the child has a secure base. There has to be trust on the part of the child that underneath it all, he or she is loved.

Family therapy can really help if things are cyclical because unless someone steps in to change the patterns – how parent relates to child and vice versa – it just perpetuates. The sooner you get help, the better: younger children are more able to adapt to changes in their parents.Ryan Lowe

• Ryan Lowe is a consultant child, adolescent and family therapist,childpsychotherapy.org.uk

Why divorce can be so difficult for teenage children

Tags

Children, Divorce, family, parents, relationships, Teens, young people

Why divorce can be so difficult for teenage children

“Peter, just to say, I’m thinking of you and I love you very much. It would be great to talk to you, Dad.”

“Fuck off.”

The text messages between Chris Huhne and his then 18-year-old son, Peter, are painful for any father or son to read.

Over a period of 11 months to May 2011, they show a dad attempting to maintain a connection with his son as he goes through a messy and very public divorce. They also show a son who is absolutely furious with his father – for his “affairs”, for reducing their relationship “to lies and pleasantries”, for being “a pathetic loser and a joke”.

When I was 16 and my parents separated, I vowed that I would never forget what it was like to be a teenager in that painful situation, but reading Peter’s texts, 20 years on, I realised I had.

None of us can judge whether Peter’s anger is justifiable or not, but it is shocking. And it sheds light on an overlooked part of divorce: how deeply it can affect adult, or late-teenage, children.

I know so many people whose parents did something similar to mine: struggled on in a difficult marriage “for the sake of the children”, finally splitting up when the kids went to university or were considered old enough to handle it. This can be a selfless parental act, and is often what the children want: although my parents were visibly unhappy in my teenage years I was desperate for them to stay together.

The upside is that it can be better to maintain the familiar family structure, says Christine Northam, a relationships counsellor for Relate; the downside is that children may develop in “a sterile and not very loving” environment.

Unfortunately, parents who stay together for the children “don’t take into account the model they are presenting to their children”, thinks Northam, and these loveless examples can hamper children in their adult relationships. Parents staying together for the children may have another person in their lives and children learn to keep secrets, or protect mum or dad from the infidelity. Parents “are modelling something that perhaps is not very good for the kids”, says Northam.

My parents divorced in the pre-mobile phone era, although I don’t think I would have sent my dad messages like Peter’s. But I was angry with my father for several years, blamed him for the family breakdown, and sought to support my mum. As a teenager, I was deeply critical of my dad and what I regarded as his flaws. I think my feelings were complicated by my struggle to emerge as a man in my own right: somehow, my dad’s desires and relationships were embarrassing and eclipsed my own and, I felt, inhibited me from expressing desire or forming romances of my own.

“It’s loss, it’s grief, it’s bereavement,” says Northam of the anger felt by late teens whose parents divorce. “Kids of 18, 19 are quite judgmental; it’s all very black and white. They’ve lost what they had – they’ve lost mum and dad together. People just don’t understand that when they think: ‘I’ll have an affair and leave.’ Kids love stability and the family they grew up with, and that is the model we buy into as a society.”

It is easy for parents to assume their late-teenage children are more grownup than they are, says Angharad Rudkin, a clinical psychologist and chartered member of the British Psychological Society who works with adolescents struggling to come to terms with family breakdown. If they are 17 or 18, we may overestimate teenage maturity because they no longer have irrational strops. In fact, research shows that the brain continues to develop until the age of 25 or 26. “Assuming an older teenager will be able to understand why we’ve split up, and is sensible and fair, is still asking an awful lot,” says Rudkin. “Older teenagers can look back and feel like they were living a lie – that this family life they had grown up with and perhaps never questioned was something their parents were just waiting to break up when they went away to university.”

Splitting up when children are young adults may spare everyone awkward enforced access; the weekends with dad or the new life divided between two homes. But it creates a new difficulty: how can a parent who is shunned by a teenage child maintain contact? If they back off to give teenagers space to rage, that can be interpreted as uncaring. After my parents split, I remember feeling that the onus was on my dad to maintain contact with me; luckily for both of us, he did.

When you keep reassuring your teen that you love them, only to be faced by insults or silence, it must be hard not to lash out, or at least tell them it is tough for you too, and they are old enough to deal with it. It is absolutely essential, Rudkin and Northam agree, that divorcing parents of late teens remember to be the grownups. “You will have to swallow your pride and take the more grownup stance – they are still going to be furious little kids under it all,” she says. “It’s the adult’s responsibility to go out of their way to make contact with the teenager, and not expect a gracious response.”

Grownup children may become one parent’s confidante or “best friend” and children then feel responsible for their parent’s happiness (as they often take on an unnecessary responsibility for the disintegration of their parents’ marriage). “The parents need to stay in the role of parents,” says Northam. “Fathers need to remember that however grownup your child may look, you are still the father, and you need to be the parent who makes the effort to see your children – it’s not the kids’ responsibility. It sounds a bit banal, but one of the obvious things [for a departing father to do] is to say sorry.”

I have no idea whether Chris Huhne and Peter, who is 20 and at university, have repaired their relationship since those awful text exchanges. I hope they have. And if they haven’t, I hope that Chris is still trying, and Peter feels less fury.

Twenty years on from my parents’ divorce, the fact that I find it easier to empathise with Chris than with Peter’s teenage anger is one sign that my dad and I managed to repair our relationship. My own teenage rage seems a world away. I’m very grateful my dad never stopped trying with me, and I admire him for it now, even though I am not sure that a child ever forgets the pain their parents cause, no matter how grownup they are.

Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

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advertising, alcohol, anorexia, anxiety, bulimia, daughters, Depression, Eating Disorders, family, media, mental health issues, parents, pressure, self-harm, social media, Teens

Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

It’s a freezing night in Bristol, and snow is forecast – but every seat at Colston Hall in the city centre was sold out weeks ago, and not only for Ronan Keating who’s playing in the main auditorium. Also packing them in is a 59-year-old, softly spoken Australian psychotherapist, who will take to the stage for 90 minutes with just a whiteboard and some ideas that will keep his audience on the edge of their seats.

The psychotherapist is Steve Biddulph, and most of the people queuing up to hear him are the mothers of teenage girls. A few years ago Biddulph toured Britain warning of a crisis facing boyhood: now he is back with a similar message about girlhood. And if the audience here is anything to go by, he’s definitely touched a nerve. “Parents of girls are seriously worried about their daughters,” says Saffia Farr, editor of Juno magazine and the organiser of the Bristol part of Biddulph’s country-wide tour. “They feel there’s this overwhelming tide of advertising that’s targeting their daughters, of inappropriate clothing being sold in the shops, of media messages that encourage their girls to grow up way, way before their time. And they want to know what they can do about it.”

Telling them what they can do about it is Biddulph’s mission. “A few years ago, boys were a disaster area – there was an epidemic of ADHD, they were underperforming in exams, they were drinking too much and getting involved in wild behaviour,” he says. “Back then, girls seemed to be doing just fine. But, about five years ago, that all changed – suddenly, girls’ mental health started to plummet. Everyone knew a girl, or had a girl themselves, who had an eating disorder or who was depressed or was self-harming. It was a huge change in a very short period; I started to investigate why this was happening.”

Biddulph lives and works in Australia, but the crisis he sees brewing for young girls seems to be echoed across the Western world – and, in Britain, the figures suggest it’s worse than in other countries. A few weeks ago, the charity Childline announced a 68 per cent increase in youngsters contacting them about self-harming, and said most of the increase was among girls. The problem also seemed to be affecting teenagers at a younger age, with 14-year-olds now likely to be among callers.

Anxiety and depression in teenage girls is also on the rise: research from the Nuffield Foundation last year found that the proportion of 15- and 16-year-olds reporting feeling frequently anxious or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years, and is more common in girls: it has jumped from one in 30 to two in 30 for boys, and from one in 10 to two in 10 for girls. Meanwhile, a report from the Department of Health found teenage girls in Britain are more likely to binge drink than teenage girls anywhere else in Europe; more than half of 15- and 16-year-olds admit they drink to excess at least once a month. A separate report in 2011 found that one in five girls in this age bracket who drink at least once a week have drunken sex and later regret it.

Anorexia and bulimia are also dramatically on the increase: official figures for hospital admissions released last October pinpointed a 16 per cent rise in hospital admissions for eating disorders, and showed that one in every 10 of these admissions was a 15-year-old girl.

“There’s plenty to be concerned about,” Biddulph says. “Everyone who has a teenage daughter right now sees this, in their child and among their child’s friends.” The people they blame, he says, are the advertising industry and the media. “They are driving girls’ sensibilities and making them miserable. The corporate world has identified them as a new market for products, and is preying on them.” During his talk, Biddulph describes teenage girls as being out in the wilderness, surrounded by hyenas: it’s starting to get dark, he tells his audience, but they are all alone out there.

His message, though, is one of empowerment: he encourages parents to get together, to challenge the advertising industry and to lobby the Government to impose more restrictions on advertisers.

“Take the drinks industry – about 30 per cent of the market is sales to underage drinkers,” he says. “Alcohol companies are extremely powerful – but parents are powerful, too, and they have to stand against this and stop the marketing of alcopops and push for a higher drinking age.”

But the battle needs to be fought on a domestic as well as a policy front. “What we need to do is re-evaluate how we think of teenage girls: the current philosophy is that they’re growing older, so they need us less. But I believe that teenage girls go through a kind of second babyhood, and they in fact need their parents more than ever. We have to spend time with our daughters at this age: talk to them, listen to them, keep in touch with them. Staying connected to their parents makes all the difference to how they cope with the pressures they’re up against.”

Case study

Lindsay Julian, 51, lives in Salisbury. She has three daughters: Emily is 24, Olivia is 14, and Amelia is 11. She also has a son, Alexander, 28

“Emily got into drinking when she was about 15, and she started taking drugs fairly soon after that. It was a real roller-coaster time for all of us: sometimes she’d drink a lot and run off, and we’d have no idea where she was. One time, she didn’t come back all night, and we ended up calling the police. They were difficult times.

“There are so many pressures on young girls today – you’re very aware of that as a mother of daughters. So when my younger girls got close to the age where things got difficult with Emily, I thought: we’re going to do things differently this time round. I sent them to a Steiner school, where I think the pressures are lessened: the philosophy is holistic, it’s not all about exam results, which I think can be very stressful for young girls.

“Some of my daughters’ friends spend a lot of time on social media, texting and on Facebook – but I’m careful to limit those things for my girls, and it does make a difference. They watch TV but I monitor it – in some homes, TV seems like a third parent, and I don’t want it to be like that in our house. A lot of teenage girls never switch off, they’re constantly connected, and that puts them under pressure from one another as well as from advertisers.

“We’ve got friends where you can see that their 14-year-olds are more like adults; the wanting to drink, to go to parties all the time.

“Emily is fine now: things turned around for her eventually, and she now works as a researcher and has written a book. She’s a rock for her younger sisters and I’m very proud of her. I know you could say that she was OK in the end, but I don’t think it’s an experience I’d want to go through with my younger daughters. I think their adolescence could be happier, and less fraught, than Emily’s was.”