If no one’s telling their story, vulnerable children become the problem

I remember sitting in a child protection conference in London, listening to Camila Batmanghelidjh speak. The passion in the room was not performative or sentimental, but urgent. She spoke as if the children she worked with were present, as if they could hear us. She refused distance. She refused abstraction.

What stayed with me was not simply her critique of systems, but her insistence that when children fall through the gaps, it is not accidental. It happens because their stories become fragmented, diluted, or inconvenient. Because no one insists on holding the whole picture.

Years later, working in CAMHS as a safeguarding lead and the only social worker within my team, I find myself thinking about that moment often. Particularly when I sit with children who are known to multiple services, repeatedly in crisis, and yet still fundamentally unseen.

Many of the young people I work with are highly visible but only at the point of rupture. Police involvement. Missing episodes. Court thresholds. Emergency responses.

These are not children who slip quietly through the cracks. They arrive loudly, urgently, and often frighteningly carrying behaviour that alarms systems but obscures meaning. By the time they reach the attention of youth justice or safeguarding panels, harm has already occurred.

We call these “risks”. But in reality, these risks have already materialised.

Across youth justice, child protection, and policing, I have repeatedly seen something important: professionals want to make trauma-informed decisions. Police officers, Youth Offending Service colleagues, and CPS decision-makers do not enter this work to prosecute vulnerable children.

What they need and often lack is the narrative.

They need to understand the child’s environment: chronic instability at home, neurodevelopmental needs, exposure to domestic volatility, exploitation masquerading as affection, exclusion from education, and profound loneliness. 

Without this context, decisions default to incidents rather than meaning.

Because of my background in youth offending and child protection, I am often able to provide that narrative, translating a child’s distress across systems. When the full story is held, outcomes change. Prosecution becomes a last resort rather than a reflex.

The problem is not professional indifference, it’s what happens when no one holds the story. When context is missing, children become the problem, and in the absence of narrative, vulnerability is easily mistaken for intent. Neurodivergence becomes “non-compliance”. Trauma becomes “challenging behaviour”. Exploitation becomes ‘lifestyle choice”.

Children who have never been consistently valued learn to seek connection wherever it is offered. Online. With adults who notice them. With peers who provide belonging. When harm follows, systems respond to the behaviour, not the deprivation that shaped it.

And so the child becomes the site of intervention, rather than the conditions around them.

Batmanghelidjh wrote powerfully about children who fall through the gaps: young people without sustained intervention, without care, without anyone holding them in mind. Her words were confronting because they forced society to face an uncomfortable truth: what do we expect when children are raised without safety, love, or meaning?

At the time, her voice through her writing and public presence carried those children into the public consciousness. We were forced to see them.

Today, that collective holding feels weaker.

Austerity, service fragmentation, and rising thresholds have narrowed what systems can contain. Education, one of the most protective spaces for vulnerable children, now excludes many of those who most need it. The gaps Camila spoke about have not closed; they have widened.

I work with many children from trauma backgrounds who are excluded from school. Once removed from education, they lose routine, identity, and daily relational contact. Loneliness follows quickly.

In that vacuum, exploitation thrives. These young people do not experience themselves as “making poor choices”. They experience themselves as being chosen, often for the first time. Attention feels like worth. Risk feels like connection.

When we respond only to the resulting behaviour, we miss the point entirely.

Increasingly, I hear young people say they want a diagnosis, sometimes specifically a diagnosis of personality disorder. Not because they want a label, but because they want validation.

A diagnosis can become proof that their pain is real, that how they feel makes sense, that they are not simply “too much”.

When care, consistency, and understanding are absent, diagnosis risks becoming a substitute for being held in mind. This is not a failure of young people; it is a signal of unmet need.

As practitioners, we are often asked for our views late in the process, when harm has already occurred, when decisions feel binary, when capacity is exhausted. We carry the weight of knowing what would help, and the limits of what exists.

The passion to protect these children is there across services. What is missing is not care, but containment at a societal level.

I am not writing this to romanticise the past, or to elevate any one individual. Camila Batmanghelidjh was not perfect. But she was unapologetic in insisting that children who did not fit still mattered, and that their stories demanded space in the public sphere.

If we no longer speak with that urgency, if we allow context to be replaced by incident and meaning by management, then we should not be surprised by the outcomes we see.

When children grow up without consistent care, safety, or understanding, the question is not why they struggle but why we are so willing to look away.

Carrying that truth forward, even in small ways, is now the responsibility of all of us.

Jackie Gilbert is a senior CAMHS practitioner