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Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here. I've become acquainted with the mission of the IAFP and your work. Carine Minne and Ronald Doctor are also leaders in my organisation, the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). I'd like to share something of their work in the IPA as it is related to violence and to psychoanalysis and the law, and to think with you about our shared commitment to societal issues. Your theme for the conference is extremely relevant to today's global environment—“Violence as a public health emergency: preventing, treating and humanizing the dangerous mind” since the theme holds the goals and values that the IPA shares with you—prevention, treatment, and the humanising of all kinds of troubled minds, including those who are a danger to the public.
We live in the context of a shocking level of death amongst children that illustrates the public health emergency created by violence. A 15 February 2022 report by the London-based charity Save the Children estimates that more than half a million babies may have died as a result of conflict over the past five years. That's 100,000 babies annually or, shockingly, 300 babies every day. The death toll of children does not include only those killed directly by fighting, but children who die of starvation, outbreaks of disease, or damage to ambulances/hospitals. The data is alarming, so alarming as to be hard to grasp. They reflect human beings' potential for deadly violence and its indirect as well as its direct consequences.
Allow me please to tell you a bit about the IPA's activities in areas of social concern and need. The mission of the IPA has traditionally focused on clinical psychoanalysis as practised in the consulting room, creating standards for training of psychoanalysts, and developing the science of psychoanalysis. But in 2017, however, the IPA President Virginia Ungar and Vice-President Sergio Nick created a branch of the IPA called IPA in the Community. In 2021 the Vice-Presid