This story begins and ends with a photograph taken when I was two years old. Finding it was like discovering that I really did exist after all . It was as if someone was saying ‘No, it wasn’t all in your imagination, that childhood really did happen, and it happened to you.’Brought up in South London by violent and abusive parents, the Roche children knew only cruelty, neglect, starvation and squalor. As one of ten and regularly b...

We are presently living at a truly extraordinary time of profound transformation. Most people, wherever they may be living in the world, are presented with very real and great dangers but equally real and perhaps even greater opportunities. To survive and thrive in the 21st century it is essential to activate our intuition and to awaken our spiritual consciousness. The royal road, the fundamental skill, to achieve this is prayer.Integrating the teachings of the spiritual tradition,...

To live well one must be able to die well and vice versa. Life and death are two faces of the same coin but with a fundamental transformation when one moves from the spiritual dimension to the physical and back to the spiritual. Actually, there is but one thing: Life without beginning and without ending but with two expressions, one on the spiritual plane and the other on the material plane. Today, in the West we find a great paradox: we have made enormous progress at the material, technol...

Karen McConnel earned a B.A. from the University of Toledo and her M.S.W. from the University of Alabama. She developed and coordinated a Therapeutic Foster Care Program and was Executive Director of a community-based agency providing services for runaway and homeless youth. Eileen Brand is a journalist and author whose work has been published in newspapers and journals in the US.

'If you say anything to your mother, I'll tell her it was your brother. And then he'll be locked away in prison forever because of you.'Zara's stepfather, Hassan, mercilessly bullied her brother and sister. But at just seven years old Zara knew she could never tell anyone about what Hassan was doing to her.For the next nine years, she kept the terrible secret, until eventually she found the courage to fight back. But was she too late to save the people she loved?

In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times bestseller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of 13-year-old Zadie.When the young teenage girl runs away from home and is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be.Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie she is polite and well-behaved, but...

'In retrospect, I can see I was the perfect candidate for child abuse. My parents had divorced and my mother didn't show me much love. Her self-imposed isolation kept me away from other children. My abuser had nobody in his way.'Please Let It Stop is a gripping and ultimately inspiring memoir of suffering and determination, of obstacles and inner battles. Jacqueline Gold was abused by her stepfather for many years, but one day she summoned the courage to a...

Kevin Lewis grew up on a council estate in South London. Beaten and starved by his parents, ignored by the social services and bullied at school, he was offered a chance to escape this nightmare world and was put into care. Despite his best efforts to make things work out, his life spiralled out of control. At the age of 17 he became caught up in the criminal underworld of London, where he was known as 'The Kid'. From the violent anger he suffered at the hands of his mother and father, to ...

When eight-year-old Jayne left bomb-torn Northern Ireland, her family stayed with relations and a distant relative began a campaign of abuse so horrifying that her world was shattered forever. When the family moved again, Jayne thought the nightmare was over. She was wrong. Her relative came too. And, as her parents had to work nights, Jayne's abuser became her carer.Raped repeatedly by him, beaten, abused and battered, Jayne's life was a living hell.One thing kept Jayne sa...

Five heart-stopping true stories of terror and triumph, told by the man who tried to make life better for these troubled children ...Clive, a thirteen-year-old victim of terrifying demonic visions, tells frightening stories of abuse and imprisonment. Could they be genuine?Patrick, twelve, bravely setting out to find the truth about his birth family - however painful it may be ...Six-year-old Johnny, tiny and undernourished, desperately tries to recover from a brain-...

'I squeezed through the narrow gap and out into the hallway and I stood for a moment, unable to decide where to go. Should I make a dash for the kitchen, where my mother would be swigging from a bottle? Or should I run upstairs and try to find somewhere to hide? It was a choice I didn't really need to make, because there was no escape'Anna Lowe grows up on the doorsteps of pubs, waiting for her mum to come out. Having to give up her bedroom to her mother's drunken friends....

At six years old Abbie is sent to live with her new stepmother who tortures her and subjects her to horrific abuse. Abbie's teen years are defined by violence drugs sex and crime. By sixteen Abbie is homeless and pregnant and the system that was supposed to protect her has given up too. Haunted by secrets will anyone see her invisible tears?