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In the introduction to her book, Monica Lanyado sets out her thesis – that some children come into the world with ‘nearly all the cards stacked against him or her from the start of life’ (p. xvii). However, she is quick also to point out that ‘it is important to remember […] that there have been, and often remain, many people involved in these troubled lives, who are trying to help, and keep on trying to help’ (p. xvii). In this way, the reader is introduced from the start to this book’s central preoccupation, which is clear from the title: how the despair experienced by these children and those around them might just possibly be transformed into hope.
In the first chapter, Lanyado explores some of the consequences of neglect and trauma. She refers to great nineteenth century literature, in which children lived in poverty, unable to rely on the adults around them to take care of them, experiencing trauma which embedded itself into their psyche. She cites Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Victor Hugo’s Gavroche in Les Miserables, as characters which move the reader: ‘great literature enables the reader to identify with characters such as Oliver and Gavroche, and briefly get a sense of what it would be like to live their lives.’ (p. 2) She continues: ‘the children that this book is about are the survivors of similar starts to Oliver and Gavroche’. My feeling is that this is a book also about those ‘readers’ who are moved to try to help, and who hold out the possibility of hope in the face of what can feel like insurmountable despair.
Lanyado makes a harrowing list of the difficulties these children can carry with them, when removed from their birth families, explaining why it is so hard to care for them:
‘Their basic trust in any adult’s capacity to care for them has been fundamentally compromised by their birth parents’ inability to care for them. This lack of trust is transferred into any potential new relationship including the psychotherapeutic relationship, and res