“Tell my wife I love her.” The last words spoken by an Italian pensioner isolated in the ICU early in the COVID-19 pandemic echo the anguish and loss of families and children the world over. With global fatalities surpassing the one million mark and total cases nearing 36 million, we are living through the biggest shared… Read more →←
Author: Benjamin Perks
It’s hard to think of a crime whose victims are more faceless and vulnerable than victims of child sexual abuse. In most middle and low income countries, the subject of child sexual abuse remains largely taboo, without a social imperative to report suspicion of the crime within the community and with no ready help for children. While… Read more →←
“…….seeking but a moment’s rest among the long-forgotten haunts of childhood, and the resorts of yesterday; and dimly finding fear and horror everywhere….” –Charles Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit London,1843 Everyone knows poverty drives inequity. Here in Montenegro one of the ways we address this is by supporting… Read more →←
As you read this, a teen somewhere is making a decision they may regret for the rest of their lives, one with high costs for themselves, their families and their communities. Joining a gang or a terrorist organization or committing a serious crime. Every teen everywhere faces a turbulent transition to adulthood: the rapid development of… Read more →←
Anyone who has been anywhere near a three-year-old recently will attest to their inexhaustible curiosity. They ask as many as 100 questions an hour – and around about the age of three, those questions switch from “what and where” to “how and why” questions – in a search for meaning in the world around them. Early childhood is… Read more →←
For most mothers, the first embrace and skin-on-skin contact with her newborn, moments after delivery, is one of the most precious and magical moments in the journey of parenthood. But sometimes, perhaps because of family breakdown, addiction or perceptions about a disability, a mother turns away from her baby and abandons him or her at… Read more →←
Even the most hard-nosed economist will now concede investment in good early childhood has the biggest return on public investment. But what about a reverse argument that failure to invest in prevention of bad early childhood experience is the most costly oversight a government can make? This is the subject of my recent TedX talk in… Read more →←
