Unmuted
Unmasking the stories of brilliant people.
Every episode, Unmuted’s Gary Robinson, invites an unsung hero to join him in sharing the experiences that have changed their life and the lives of others.
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Benjamin Perks - A No 'Bullsh*t' Approach To Saving Children's Lives; At Scale
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What if you could look back on your life and see that your work has made the lives of millions of children around the world so much better?
Ben Perks is a leader at UNICEF, an author and child rights advocate who spent his youth running away from violent care homes. His inspirational story is far from ordinary and proves that it just takes one person to see the potential in you, for you to believe in yourself.
Ben is the cycle breaker and change maker who was told “Your job is to save children’s lives at scale” and rose to the challenge. He could either have turned his life into a victimhood of his younger years, or used his lived experiences to create a positive impact and change for children around the world. He chose the latter.
In this episode, we discuss who inspired him to escape the life society would have conditioned him into. The inspirational leader who demanded “No bullshit” and to focus on their real outcome - to save children’s lives at scale.
Not to mention the incredible work that is showing parents the skills to be able to meaningfully love their children, and in turn healing themselves. True proof that love heals.
His book Trauma Proof explores how childhood trauma is not an insurmountable problem, it is in fact one that we can heal from globally through simple, scalable united actions.
“What is our legacy? We now have this science that tells us if we can reduce childhood adversity, improve nurturing care, we can have much better outcomes and save a lot of money for the lives of the life cycle. And for society, that should be a no-brainer.”
If one person can break the cycle, this podcast asks - can we all be cycle breakers?
Take a listen, this is a powerful episode!
#unicef #childhoodtrauma #generationalcyclebreaking #traumaproof #inspiringpodcasts
Music: 'Spirit of Fire' - fiftysounds.com
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My guest on this episode of Unmuted is Benjamin Box.
SPEAKER_01Whenever the children's home, every morning I'd go to the mailbox, right? And I expected some kind of letter from somewhere, like a Miss Haversham star benefactor, or my parents, or someone saying, This is all a terrible mistake. You are loved, we are coming to get you.
SPEAKER_02Ben is a child rights advocate, an author, and a UNICEF leader.
SPEAKER_01In Afghanistan, I uh coordinated an effort in northern Afghanistan to get about three million children into school, 90% of them for the first time.
SPEAKER_02Ben's book called Trauma Proof describes Ben's own journey of a childhood in care and 25 years plus of working for the UN on child rights. And I've got to say, in this interview, his passion for all human rights is as evident as ever.
SPEAKER_01If you look at culture wars in the UK now, everybody's speaking, but none of these people have changed anything in the world. Right? All these campaigns, people on TV, what have they changed? I can't see the result.
SPEAKER_02We discussed the domestic perception of his role of that of UNICEF and the UN.
SPEAKER_01There's this weird stereotype in the UK that somehow UNICEF or people like us are running around with a box of supplies in the desert and giving them out to refugees. That's not what we primarily do. We work at a very high policy level.
SPEAKER_02We chat about what we can learn from other countries.
SPEAKER_01So Harvard Graduate School of Education set up a program with schools where they do a register of relationships. They look at the school register, all the teachers gather, they put a gold circle next to the child they have a good relationship with, then they look at the aggregate register and a child that has no gold circles, they reach out to actually to make sure intentionally a relationship is um created with that.
SPEAKER_02So before any of that, let's start at the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01When I was 15, I was in a children's home, but I spent half my time running away and living on the streets. I'd had a friend killed in a knife fight. I mean, we talk about knife crime today, but we had knife crime back then as well. Um it was then and remains one of the major um major um causes of homicide in the United Kingdom. Uh and I was just uh I was deep in trouble, and I'd been thrown out of a couple of schools, and I went to a school for kids that had been kicked out of school. It was uh a rough place, but there was this teacher in there, and there's something that I think I I was communicating on my first day at the school that kind of captured her interest, and she had a long conversation with me, and she introduced me to literature. Um, she the first book she gave me, I think it was Animal Farm by George Orwell, and I I began, I mean, I think she was interested in the way I was communicating, and she saw something in there that had potential. So she she she she connected with me around literature and stories um that ignited a lifelong passion, and now I'm a writer, which is great. Um, but I think that she made me realize that she made me feel like I mattered as an individual, and I had never had that feeling, right? Because if you're in care, you know, I think that the a biological prerequisite for every child is to feel safe and loved. And kids in care and other kids that are experiencing adversity at home don't have that feeling. So the next best hope is a teacher, and so she she made a deep connection with me, and she helped me to find a pathway away from crime or or danger towards learning and reading and activism. Um, and and so I, you know, went off London around the world and and and had a UN career. And about 10 years ago, I was at an event in Harvard where somebody was talking about the power of teachers to transform the lives of kids that are in deep trouble. Uh and I remembered my teacher, and so I called her. I found out I spent several months trying to find her, reconnected with her, went to go and meet her. Um, and now I see her every couple of years. And last year I took my son to go and meet her. So that's my teacher. Her name is Jan Rapport, and she, if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be here speaking to you now.
SPEAKER_02When you were 15 and before you before you met Jan, were you just surviving day-to-day? I mean, what were you what were your expectations as a teenager?
SPEAKER_01I lived in a children's home where you would go to bed at night expecting to wake up being punched in the face. It was extremely violent. It was uh a supply line for crime and and doing the doing going to school and doing normal stuff was not the norm there. It was most of the kids were in some kind of um suspension unit or some other type of facility. I don't even know what they call them today for kids that aren't in you know uh kicked out or or or removed from mainstream education. Uh so the survival, I found the children's home humiliating and uh violent, and uh I just ran away and lived on the streets. Um, and so I'd sleep on park benches or in squats with punks and and rastafarians, and and kind of I picked up this this um this kind of quite eclectic culture, very young from that experience, which is another interesting thing, but it was just survival. Yeah, I think it was just survival, but I always always carried, and I think this is what helped me some kind of optimism, which I think set me apart. Maybe that's what the teachers saw. And I tell this story in the book that I told it to my wife a few years ago that when I was in the children's home, every morning I would go to the mailbox, right? And I expected some kind of letter from somewhere like a like a Miss Haversham style benefactor, or my parents or someone saying this is all a terrible mistake, you are loved, we are coming to get you. Uh, and obviously it never came, uh, but I still went back every day. Even despite whatever was terrible would happen in the children's home, I would still go back to the mailbox. I'm saying mailbox because I'm in the States, we call it a letterbox in the UK, right? Um, so so I would go back every uh every every day and and check it. And and when I told my wife this, she found it a bit depressing, but I found it kind of optimistic because it showed an underlying sense of optimism, and I think the teacher tapped into that and turned that into resilience and vision for what I could be and where I could go.
SPEAKER_02We talk about in terms of in EQ terms, self-regulation. So, you know, when you when you um were leading up to I've got this magical age of 15 in my mind for some reason, but let's say 15. Yeah, you know, and you'd said that you were you were in a world where um you know you know violence with the norm. I I imagine there was fear you were there to defend yourself as well to a certain extent. I mean, how did you have any self-regulation?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I I think I did. I think I had this sense of I think I always had a sense maybe that I would get out of this. I don't know. And I think that whatever I would do would would be towards that end. I think in a way, running away from the children's home was a kind of self-regulation because I saw it as being very violent. I saw that my emotional world couldn't cope with it, and so I ran away and slept in the park. And then uh at some point I go back and and and I I I think that I was just yeah, I think there was um there was some kind of emotional control. Uh, but obviously I got kicked out of school, I um I got into trouble, I I uh didn't have good role models, and most importantly of all, I didn't have relationships, right? So I think people mature through relationships.
SPEAKER_02You mentioned there a few months ago that you had quite an eclectic, maybe not friends around you, but you certainly had people who were making up your world, um, whether that was good, bad, or indifferent. Did you learn things from strangers?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, I grew up in a very um multiracial, uh diverse um neighborhood. See, I I spent my childhood in Birmingham and in London. So in Birmingham, I grew up in the neighborhood that UB40 came from and Steel Pulse and that kind of reggae punk crossover era, and I had I had uh within that uh a bit of an identity, right? You know, so I I felt some degree of belonging. I was like an inner city kid who grew up with different types of music, and and and uh I had I would go in and out of relationships with people, but these were all these were also people that were living very transient lives. So a lot of drugs, um, a lot of crime, uh, a lot of day-to-day survival. A lot of people just disappear. I I just disappeared. If a police found me on the street, I would disappear, I'd be taken back to the children's homes. So so there was a lot of um, it was precarious, but there was something in there that I I think I internalized and still there now, you know. Um and and yeah, uh and the relationships, I think I formed my first enduring friendship when I was 15 or 16 as well. Um, and it was interesting, it was a friend that was in into all that inner city kind of point reggae vibe, but um had a very strong work ethic ethic and a sign of a view of a future, and it was a little bit older uh than me. And I think that became something of a role model as well. And that friendship has a endured um a lot. Uh my teacher obviously um, and then later on, I I yeah, I befriended a family when I was in London. I I I befriended a family that I became very close to, and now I'm you know that I'm God's parents and their grandkid, you know. So so I have all this this this uh these these connections that I think helps me get through.
SPEAKER_02When you look back at what you've done with your career, uh and I encourage people to um to search you out if they haven't already, you've done massive things. Is there anything in particular that stands out amongst all that, everything that you've done with UNICEF, for instance, or your connections with the UN? Is there something where you've gone, wow, yeah, do you know what? I've made that difference at scale.
SPEAKER_01I think that uh there are things that I've done in the past. Um in Afghanistan, I uh coordinated an effort in northern Afghanistan to get about three million children into school, 90% of them for the first time. And this was after the collapse of the Taliban, uh so 20 years ago. Um I we worked on uh vaccinating millions of children against polio um and measles. You remember that Afghanistan had the worst um maternal and child mortality rates and the worst uh education inclusion rates outside of sub-Saharan Africa and maybe the third or fourth worst thing in the world overall. And so that was an enormous um undertaking. Uh I I also I also I want to come back to that because there's a really interesting story attached to that. I want to talk to you about it. But uh so I've done stuff like that. I've worked in countries where we have dramatically improved, for example, disability inclusion in school or or massively reduced um institutionalization of young children, eradicated institutionalization of young children. But the one thing that is the pinnacle of my career was this year. Um I organized the world's first ever Global Caregiver Forum in uh Madrid. It was UNICEF and WHO, so it's a UN event with the government of Spain and with the Queen of Spain present, and I think 20, 25 countries. Um, and the idea was that every child should grow up safe and loved. And we are the first generation in history who have the evidence and knowledge and implementation science to really help parents build the skills to form a really strong connection with their child, to promote nurturing care and parental child mental health, and to eliminate most adverse childhood experiences. So I think we're taking a public health approach to uh to yeah, to eradicating the things that I experienced as a child, abandonment, uh maltreatment, and to promote nurturing care as the flip side of that. And that that puts caregiving and parenting into an advocacy, uh kind of a global governance policy, an advocacy track that we have for humanitarian or that we have for measles or other things, where there has been enormous progress made. So I'm expecting over the next 10-15 years to move towards universal provision of home visits and other forms of parenting programs as in a minimum package as a basic norm. And that is the thing that I am most proud of because I think it really relates to the things that I'm really interested in.
SPEAKER_02You know, in your in your answer uh regarding Afghanistan, you're going to elaborate on something else, if I remember. You made you made reference to it.
SPEAKER_01This was really influential in in everything I ever did and continue to do. So uh what happened was the the the first government of Taliban collapsed in Afghanistan. Um, it was recognized that this was going to be a huge humanitarian operation, one of the biggest humanitarian operations in the history of the UN. And um the I think the leadership in in of the the uh of the UN in Afghanistan called for a kind of a cadre of young, younger staff who were really outcome focused. And uh I remember rolling up at the office uh with a whole group of us that were going to go to different parts of the country and to really kind of deliver uh results at scale. Uh, we had this French um chief, uh head of mission called Eric La Roche, and he looked at all of us and said, I can't do his accent. I'll try and do his accent. He said, Uh, your job is to save uh children's lives at scale, no bullshit, no bullshit meetings, no bullshit emails, just stop children dying, right? It is the outcome that you're here for, and I always remember that. It's I sorry, my accent is awful. I really need to work on it, I need to go to drama school and improve my French accent. But it was just this idea that you have to focus on the outcome. If you look at culture wars in the UK now, everybody's speaking, but none of these people have changed anything in the world, right? Every all these campaigns, people on TV, what have they changed? I can't see the result. So I always learned from that point onwards that whatever I did had to be attached to the results. I didn't want to go to bullshit meetings, pardon my French, as he had instructed us not to. I don't want to get involved in bullshit email change. I only want to work on stuff that will result in change, positive change based on settled human rights norms that are universal for everybody. And that has that is something that has really stayed with me throughout my whole career. No, never. Um no, uh I we we haven't the UN is present um in almost every uh my agency is almost present in almost every low and middle income country in the world, uh and has an affiliated body uh which is called a UNICEF like national committee in every high-income country. Um so so the so yeah, I mean the the human rights um convention conventions that we work to are more or less globally settled, right? They're they're more or less universally settled. There's some backtracking now on human rights, but you know, the way that this is quite interesting because people don't know this back home. The way that the UN works, UN agencies like UNICEF, a World Health Organization, is that we have five-year plans with countries and they're agreed with governments. Most of our staff in the country are local staff. Um, so we we are embedded in the local uh cultural and political structure. That's how we get things done. There's this weird stereotype in the UK that somehow UNICEF or or people like us are running around with a box of supplies in the desert and giving them out to refugees. That's not what we primarily do. We work at a very high policy level with governments. We have diplomatic um uh role, and we're diplomatically equivalent in the countries, and we we work very closely with our counterparts at the ministerial and prime ministerial level in in government to introduce things that promote, protect, and advance the rights of children across health, education, child protection, um early childhood development, and all of those areas in a very sophisticated way.
SPEAKER_02Is there an argument? I mean, when we talk about things like adverse childhood experiences, um, and we talk about trauma and things that have really been handed down to us. Really interesting. I've heard you make this point before about us being the first generation that that that's in a position to break the cycle. I think I interviewed um Nadine Burke Harris in front of an audience in Glasgow some years ago. I remember she made the same point. She made exactly the same point. Yeah. And I I wonder how uh straightforward or easy it is. Do you think we can tackle it before you and I you know shuffle off this mortal coil?
SPEAKER_01Is it doable? I think so. I think that Nadine Bakaris and I think World Health Organization and you know others would agree that it's possible. The question is, do we have the political will to do it? So how do you how would you do it? Firstly, you take a public health approach to the problem, right? So you would have a way of measuring what the baseline is, how many people are affected at population level. We already kind of have that through through different surveys, but we need to make that a global norm. You then have a target uh of how much you want to reduce the adversity by over a period, or violence against children, or maltreatment, or whatever you call it. Uh, you then introduce, you sequence the three to five things at the universal level that are likely to have, the science tells us will have the greatest impact in reducing the adversity. So one is um is parenting programs introduced at the prenatal phase. By the way, Nadine Burke Harris and Lisa D'Amour were at the event that I organized in Madrid and they very much spoke out in support of this idea. Um, we so so parenting programs have now been shown by a WHO meta-review review of over 400 randomized controlled trials to reduce maltreatment, improve nurturing care, and even improve parental mental health. And I can talk more about that later if you want, because it's a really interesting topic. So, parenting programs should be universal progressive. So there's a minimum package for all parents. So you remove the stigma or shame or anything else, it's not targeted towards child protection cases or whatever, it's universal progressive, and then parents that need more support are able to access it. Um, you remember that in attachment research, uh Bowlby said many decades ago that parents who can process their um childhood and get a vision for what they want for their own children are much less likely to transmit, right? So that's the first thing. I think, secondly, to make sure that parental leave is generous, that governments recognize that attachment is the best economic and social asset we have because it's the foundation of all learning, all growth, it's the foundation of our economy. Um, so parental leave should be much more generous and it should encourage to the extent possible parents, mums or dads, having a choice to stay with the child as much as possible between the age of zero and three for as long as possible between the age of zero and three.
SPEAKER_02Can I ask a very quick question? I don't want to put you off your stride. Do you think? In the UK, we start the education journey too early. Should that start later in life, do you think?
SPEAKER_01All right, that's that brings me on to my third thing, which is I think that at three, okay, at three, children should enter preschool. And in preschool, this is secondary attachment. In preschool, children should have um have um very strong related, they should learn through play, so not formal formalized pedagogy, but learning through play and expression and and and and and so on. Play should be formalized, maybe as a policy. Um, but children learn through play when they're young. And it's that three when children need, you know, if you've got young kids, they they they play adjacent until they're about three, and then something changes. Kids ask uh what and when questions until about three, and then they shift to how and why. And those are the points in time in child development where you need to have learning through play introduced, and the child needs to have strong attachments in in preschool. Um so on your question, I think that uh I think I see it, I see I don't think I think education starts in the womb, right? The learning process starts in the womb, and the most important parental, most important learning institution is the parental home between zero and three, because that's when brain development and language acquisition and social, emotional, linguistic development are most prolific, right? But learning has to happen in the home. Uh, so parents need to be equipped with the skills to engage with the kid in a way that's stimulating. I think at three, children are ready to go to preschool and they should go to preschool. There's an in-between which is called child care. Uh, and I think that you know there needs to be options available of childcare to support parents and children in a way that maintains attachment. Some parents will want to go back to work earlier, some would like to stay longer, um, some would like to have um care within the extended family or within the community or to share care with other parents, others would like to have more of a formalized structure. In Scandinavian countries, they recognize those different types of options and have them all, and that's what you need, right? But all of this entire package, you have to remember that when we don't do this, when we have adversity, it's the greatest public health and most costly public health problem we have. So return on investment, even making all of those options available, is huge. Yeah, so that's the first part of childhood. Then throughout childhood, we need to embed relationships in learning. Everybody needs to have what I had as a child, which is a JAN report. Everybody needs to have that teacher in school, and some places are becoming intentional about this. So, Harvard Graduate School of Education set up a program with schools where they do a register of relationships. They look at the school register, all the teachers gather, they put a gold circle next to the child they have a good relationship with, then they look at the aggregate register and a child that has no gold circles, they reach out to that kid and make sure intentionally a relationship is um created with that child and is maintained. So they have a policy of no child without a healthy secondary attachment in school. I think, and you'll know more than me, that Scotland had in its sustainable development strategy every Scottish teenager having a healthy relationship. I think that may be something that Scotland has also pioneered and is working on. So I think all of that um is preventing and responding to ACEs. And then the final thing we need to do is make sure that every all of society have the same level of awareness about child development and risk that they have about influenza or COVID, which is not difficult.
SPEAKER_02We were talking about the WHO um approach to uh parenting programs, um, I think it was, and and the mental health of parents. Um, and you had a you had a wee nugget of a story to share with us there, I think.
SPEAKER_01So, yeah, so the World Health Organization led, so just to say first, before you can really deliver change in the world, you have to have the implementation science well established. So there was a major breakthrough in 2022 when the World Health Organization led systematic review of randomized control trials on parenting programs uh was launched, and it had um you know really good findings on the intended outcomes of parenting programs: less violence against children, less maltreatment, better nurturing care, better externalizing behaviors of children. And then it showed one unintentional benefit, and that was improved parental mental health. So I when I was writing a book, I was speaking to Bruce Perry, and I said I shared this with him, and I said, What do you think is going on here? Uh and he said, Well, I think for parents, just the idea that somebody shows up, supports them, uh, plugs them into some kind of a system where they don't feel isolated really helps. And so we agreed on that. But then there was something else that I taught with him, and I this was more my idea. It was that if a parent has grown up feeling unsafe or unloved or with an less than optimum attachment, and then they learn the skills to form a stronger attachment with their child, it's reciprocal. And he agreed with this, it's reciprocal. The parent and the child is benefiting, and it really shows the extent to which love heals because what a parent's doing is learning the skills to be able to have a loving relationship with that child. So I think I think this was really powerful and told us so much about human nature, and it's a story of love. It's very hard when you talk about policy to talk about love, but this is an incredible story of uh of love based on science with scientific evidence about love.
SPEAKER_02You talked about political will, and um you uh there was a stat I heard um you make um in another interview that you were doing, and it was talking about the lack of interventions, I think, was costing countries about 12% of GDP. But if there was interventions, some of which you've described, it's about 1% of GDP. So if I'm a politician, so so I'm thinking, well, I can save some money and I can improve society, it's a no-brainer. So what's going on?
SPEAKER_01I think there's three things going on. I think the first one is political cycles. So we're only now beginning to get data sets that show a return on investment on things like parenting programs within an electoral cycle, within within three to four years. Uh, so we need more of that. That's growing, the evidence base for that is growing. Um, I think, secondly, that there is this culture. Uh, there's there's somebody who's just written a book in the US, Gary Slutkin, about violence. He said there's this culture of believing that things like adversity and violence are inevitable, that causes are a mystery. If you walk into any pub and ask people how does this start, they'll give you 10 different answers. So, what we're still trying to land is the argument and the science about about why early childhood development and prevention of maltreatment is so important. It's not yet understood. It took a couple of decades for people to understood, understand that it was possible. It wasn't insurmountable to vaccinate every child against measles and polio. Now they understood, and so now it becomes norm. We're at the pre-maturation phase in this policy area. And then the third thing that is really interesting, uh, there's um uh Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein have written a very influential book here in the US, but I think two in the UK, called Abundance, that came out last year, and it was explaining that now we have a problem with progressive ideas that um or modernizing ideas that um that people hijack them and put lots of other other uh outcomes and outputs on top of them, and then become this kind of a Christmas tree, this everything, everywhere, all at once approach. So politicians can't work with it. What politicians really need is four or five things that they can do as policies that can be measured globally across countries and that we can advance them. What happens at the moment is governments uh is that advocates, policy influencers are going to governments and saying you can improve mental health, you just need to do these 250 different things, and that doesn't work. And then you've got they also talk in the book about the noise. So, what you have is you have lots of groups in society that work on symptoms, and it becomes against their interest to accept that you you need to have an approach that addresses the underlying causal factors rather than the symptoms, because they set up inter interests. We have that in the in the global um sphere as well, in global policy advocacy as well. You have the groups around different areas, but where's the action at the causal level, the deeper level? And I think that's that's because in many ways the child protection, child development sector haven't had this, haven't been around for as long as child health. So those are some thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_02I uh as an older, older chap now, at the tender age of 56, I um I look at things like Twitter. And I worry about not all social media, because it's now a fact of life. How it's policed is another argument, I suppose. But if I look at certain certain certain um social media, like and I think Twitter is is uh is uh guilty for this um is this whole atmosphere of I think they call it in the modern parlance Ben rage bait, I think. So if you see an act of violence or you see something, you know, you're compelled to click onto it and look at school bullies, people you know, partaking in a fight, you know, hordes of youngsters, you know, sort of screaming through Marks and Spencer's and clearing the shelves, you know, all that sort of stuff. Do you feel that the the world of of social media and the rage bait and all that sort of stuff is giving us a um uh a dramatized picture of actually what's going on in the world today, i.e., is life is life as bad as it appears on social media or is it is it not? I mean it's a big question, but am I am I getting caught up in the drama of it all and life just ain't that bad?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, life is not that bad. There's a very small number of people that are um really, I think, um pushing uh uh violence narratives on uh on um social media, but it this has also been a problem in life. There was uh before social media, somebody, I think it was Gary Slutkin again writing about violence in children against violence in in the US, said recently that they did some public health mapping of where violence started, like gang violence and all of that. And the media representation before social media was that violence is everywhere, we live in a really violent society, you switch on the TV, it's shooting after shooting after shooting. When they mapped it, there was a tiny number of people that were involved in this. There was something in the culture of American media that hammed this up massively, right? Um, so it's not just social media, it's also been a problem with media. I I live in New York, as you know, and people uh uh abroad say, Well, how's it going now? You've got this kind of like very difficult culture wars, political context, and you've got all this aggression on on uh on TV and all, you know, all of this stuff going on on the news, and we watch it, and it seems to be crazy. What's going on? Um, and I I don't know because when I walk to my local neighborhoods to go and get a bagel and a coffee, everybody says good morning, everybody's in a good mood. I I just don't see the world that they see. Conversely, you might know this that people in the US come up and say, Oh, I heard the situation is very bad in London and Glasgow, and everybody's dangerous to go out. And like, it's just not like that. So I think I think there's the people broadcast what sells, right? When we go out to watch a film, we don't watch a film about somebody watering the flowers in their garden and having a sandwich uh on the patio. We watch a film about really dramatic. So we have that hunger for drama. Um, what we lack a little bit now are role models and heroes, you know. And Abraham Lincoln said uh, you know, that we need to have government that is based on the on the better angels of our nature. It's a book by Stephen Pinker, we uh I think with that title. Um I think you've had these leaders in uh in previous generations that have been able to lift us up somehow, uh, whichever political, like I think about Obama or you know, others, uh something in the UK, who lift you up to be a better society. That's what leadership should be. But now I think there's there's this political polarization in which politicians are incentivized to get people to go really tribal, and that's dangerous.
SPEAKER_02Back here uh in the in the UK in Blighty, obviously we have the what the welfare state, and um you can see how old I am. I refer to X as Twitter, and now I'm talking about the welfare state, so you can tell uh where my head's been uh prior to this conversation. But in terms of the concept of the welfare state, do you think it it works still?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I'm also I'm speaking very much in a personal capacity today, but I also work for the UN and there's a whole debate on this and have to be diplomatic about it. Um, but I am speaking in a personal capacity. I think you sometimes I I I feel that if I was going to invest in public spending, I would invest in it very early on in the life cycle more. So I think there needs to be more investment in early childhood, in supporting relationships, and a focus from uh yeah, a focus from redu creating opportunity, reducing dependency. I think that's to me that's really important. Like I I do worry sometimes, and maybe I I think that self-reliance and resilience need to be nurtured alongside opportunity. You need to have equal, much more equal opportunity. There's a great book by is it Eliza Philby who's talking about intergenerational wealth now taking over um creating wealth through employment and and endeavour as being as being uh a real problem for our society. So kids um people are going through the life cycle more dependent on the bank of Mama Dad than on their own endeavors, and I think that creates inequality. She gave the example of two 40-year-olds graduated with exactly the same degree from Cambridge. One of them at 40 had a million pounds of assets in their property, and the other one didn't, and the second one didn't because they hadn't had the money to put down for depositing on their house when they left university. That inequality is harmful for our society, and I I get it because I want to leave as much as I can for my own kids, but I I think it's harmful for um for society. So we have to have maybe a bit of a new social contract where we increase opportunities, increase the investment earlier on, maintain a true meritocracy where people who work hard can get ahead. And I think, yeah, I think that political systems that get can be dragged down by um overspending on welfare rather than investing investment in empowering people. Uh, but these are these are areas I'm not really an expert on. This is uh this is kind of my my view watching it. Absolutely as somebody who's grown up in the state.
SPEAKER_02And it's your personal view, and we we very much and I very much you know acknowledge that. I'm I'm aware of your time in New York and that you have a day job to do uh with with UNICEF. Just going back to that point about investing early. I mean, if you read your book, of course, and you read books like The Body Keeps the Score and Associated Uh Titles, I mean, it screams that if we do invest early and we do tackle things like childhood trauma, at some point the health bill of the nation is going to reduce because the health of individuals is going to get better if we can reduce those ACES scores. Is that too simplistic way to look at it?
SPEAKER_01No, you're completely right. It's it's that's the point. It's downstream costs. So if you look at any you so the Center for Disease Control, which is like the main public health kind of think tank and research body in the United States, now has uh uh an indicators, 40 or more indicators of outcomes, and they show a step, you've probably seen this slide, they show a step increase in negative life outcomes across all of those indicators for every adverse child experience you had, right? And it goes from learning outcomes to health outcomes, uh, to well-being outcomes to mental health. We know that ACs are the primary preventative cause of mental illness, of addiction. We think of obesity as well. Um, we know that if we look at um chronic repeat offenders who start their criminal career in um childhood, data from the US and from Wales and elsewhere shows us that the uh 90% of them have four or more adverse child experiences. Uh, children that grow up safe and loved just have much better outcomes across the board, and that's where you get the up to 12% of GDP costs um that are lost. It may be much higher if you include productivity, right? We don't include that in the estimate, but um it's it's astonishing that uh that we now know what of the root causes, not a symptom level, but a root cause for so many different negative outcomes. And it would completely make sense for our society to say we're going to prioritize reducing these adversities, and that would be our legacy because previous generations eradicated polio. They invented the seatbelt, which saves millions of lives a year, they invented piped water heating in houses in really cold countries. These are things that previous generations did in the 20th century for the public good, and millions and millions of people live, millions and millions of children live every year because of because these things happened in the past. What is our legacy? We now have this science that tells us if we can reduce childhood adversity, improve nurturing care, we can have much better outcomes and save a lot of money for the lives of the life cycle. And for society, that that should be a no-brainer. But we've got a job to do in landing the idea, convincing government this is the way to go. I think we're making progress. We need to keep that up.
SPEAKER_02Did writing the book um trauma-proof, was that um a natural progression in your career? Did it happen as it always been there, or did you go, right? I need a book? Or how did it come about?
SPEAKER_01So so I was a kind of a bog standard career UN person working on the full range of humanitarian issues, public health issues, child development issues. And then at some point I found myself in a senior role, sat next to a minister at a conference on deinstitutionalization. And the there was a guy, um, Professor Kevin Brown, University of Nottingham, was speaking about the impact of childhood in care, a childhood in care on the emotional world of the adult. And I was sitting there and I began to sweat and pulsate because I understood that he was talking about me in many ways. And I had suppressed this in my understanding of self for most of my adult life. Uh so I walked out of the room during the coffee. I excused myself. And I called somebody who I knew who was seeing a therapist. And I, before I could change my mind, I signed myself up for an appointment and I began a year of therapy. I um began things like meditation, uh, but I also began to read very much about where trauma um comes from and how how how it how it grows from childhood. And eventually I tracked down um a relative. It's part of this process. I tracked down a relative and I she had these photographs of me as a baby that I'd never seen. I had no photographs of my childhood, it was incredible. But I asked her about the family, and she described this situation of everybody in my family having a problem. They were all less extreme than mine, but somebody was addicted, somebody had been in a gang, somebody had uh been the domestic violence. There was it was this kind of like public health kind of organogram of misery, right? And I'd worked on public health campaigns, and I then I then began to think about my work differently. I began to think that for the rest of my career I want to work on eradicating violence, maltreatments against abandonment in the lives of children. Um, and so I kind of became a post-career UN guy. The normal thing for me to have done would have been to continue to go up the ladder of the UN, but I kind of went off to the side and worked on things that I felt really passionate about. And that's that that was um that was a change that got me really passionate about this. Uh, I continued to study and research it, and then I found myself uh in the maternity the maternity ward here in the hospital holding my son, and I uh looked down at my son and I realized uh that I would go to the ends of the world to protect my son. I would do anything to protect my son from harm or any sense that he's not loved or not cared about, I would I really realized in that moment that the cycle had broken. Right? Um and then I asked myself if if if I can break the cycle, can we not break it in a public health way before it transmits to the child? And that's where all of this stuff came from. And the book is very much part of that journey. So it hasn't always been there, it came out of that journey uh that started with a healing process.
SPEAKER_02I suppose my final question then is I've really uh loved this conversation. I've got to thank you so much for your time. You've just been so generous um with it. So, you know, the first I'm saying the first book, I'm making the assumption that trauma-proof will be your first book, but I assume it's not gonna be your last.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's a great question. Yeah, I I I think that you can see that with the teacher when I was a kid, I became really kind of committed to, but liberated by the idea of reading and writing and literature. It was something that helped me to get through life. And so writing a book was kind of, in a way, a bit of a payback to that. But I always felt that I wanted to improve and grow and continue to write more. So I I am beginning to think about my next book. I'd like to write something more about the UN and multilateralism and what's happening um right now to multiply how the system's a little bit under threat, and what do we do to get to the other side of that and to uh you know to build systems that that continue to improve human progress. And then also in the future, I think that I'd like to write, I maybe try fiction. It's very interesting that you know I work in in the UN system, which is uh a lot about um diplomacy and finding a language that everybody can agree on and and and uh getting an agreement with very different kind of partners and following process, and but I'm kind of quite an individual person, I think in many ways. So I'm in some ways I'm a bit of an ill fit for the UN, although I've loved my career very much. I hope I've given more than as much as I've got back from it. But I think that I'd love to write fiction. I'd like to just be, you know, I think that JD Smith says that when you write fiction or creative writing, it's the only form of writing that really comes from your own consciousness. Your consciousness is the workshop which produces uh the writing. So I'd really like to learn to be the fiction writer before uh uh before too long. I think that's something that I'd I will give a go. I don't know how it will go, but I will keep you posted.
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