Mary Glasgow: ‘Children are inherently kind ... it’s the adults we need to fix’

That wasn’t the original sentence. He had considerable time added to his jail term for disruptive behaviour and a refusal to submit to the regime.

He once showed me the scars left by his mother, who had punished him as a child by extinguishing cigarettes on his arms. Did this childhood abuse lead to him into a life on the wrong side of authority and the law? I couldn’t say with any confidence it didn’t.

Yet blaming a “bad childhood” for adult problems is to this day seen by many as bleeding heart liberalism. The difference now is that evidence is piling up to support the theory that Adverse Childhood Events are directly linked to bad outcomes for adults: Problematic alcohol and drug use, violence, and self harm but also a range of health problems including mental ill health.

For most of its history Children 1st was the Royal Scottish Society For The Prevention of Cruelty To Children (RSSPCC), and when Mary Glasgow became acting chief executive last year her first task was to oversee a review of its work and its purpose.

There was a concern there was a need to refocus, amid unprecedented pressures in the voluntary sector – huge, growing demand and financial constraints, the twin perils of austerity for many charities. That, combined with the risk taken by any charity accepting contracts on behalf of the public sector, of dancing to somebody else’s tune.

“We were asking, what is Children 1st for? It was exciting,” Ms Glasgow says.

But after a review, it turned out there was no need for a new mission statement.

“The answer was already there in our standing orders, written more than 130 years ago in 1884. They are beautiful. They say the charity exists ‘to prevent abuse and harm to children and to help children who have experienced harm or abuse to deal with that’.

“It could not be any clearer or more relevant,”, she says. “It felt like we needed to honour the people who came together all those years ago and honour their foresight.”

There is a pain, however, in acknowledging that, she says. “It is a shame that 135 years on we are still talking about the need to prevent harm or abuse.”

But there is progress, she says, and is relieved and delighted that science is proving the importance of the kind of work Children 1st does.

“Back then I don’t think people really understood that what happens affects the rest of your life so profoundly. We know so much more about how babies and children develop and how we as parents are affected by our own experiences.”

So for the next five years, Children 1st is aiming to double the number of children and families it reaches – in 2017 it worked with 11,000. It will do this, Ms Glasgow says, primarily by an all-out effort to address the effects of damage done in childhood.

“There is a shocking lack of support for children who have experienced complex trauma,” she explains. “Households where there is domestic violence, alcohol drugs or neglect. Children who have been abused, physically or sexually. We know Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) affect not just emotional development but physical biology.

“We also know parents use drugs and alcohol to cope with their own trauma from childhood. I love that Scotland has embraced the challenge of ACEs, and policy makers have identified it as our single biggest health challenge.”

Children 1st, under her leadership, will aim to be a key player in facing that challenge, she says. “We want to reach more parents and destigmatise asking for help. We often have conversations with parents through our services and our helpline and they will ask us: ‘Do you think I’m in a violent relationship, or use drink, or drugs, because I was sexually abused as a child?’ “We say: Maybe. Let’s explore that.”

Sometimes, she says, that will mean telling them things they don’t want to hear. The needs of the child are always the priority. “But we will work beside families and ask ‘how did you get to this place?’”

Children 1st’s new strategy will take the charity up to 2023, and includes not just a big push on trauma work, but more family support workers in schools efforts to increase awareness of the charity’s Parentline helpline and continuing to support Green MSP John Finnie’s attempt to protect children from assault with a smacking ban as it progresses at Holyrood.

“For the next five years this is where we are going to go,” Ms Glasgow says.

Despite her name, Mary Glasgow comes from Edinburgh. She was raised one of seven children in Wester Hailes – “not disadvantaged, but not well off” – and she had some young carer duties for a disabled younger sister.

She learned a lot there about communities and also stigma, she adds. “My mum and dad were committed readers, interested in politics. But I would witness teachers speaking to my mum sometimes as if they were imparting wisdom she might not understand. I would think ‘why are you talking to my mum like that’?

“I grew up in the 70s and 80s and when I look back it was really positive. We lived alongside families with big challenges – poverty, unemployment and all the things that go with that, but there was huge community spirit.

“My mum lived there her whole life. I do remember the stigma and shame of living in an area like that, you were a bit judged.”

Even now, people will laugh when she says it was a great place to grow up, she says. “But we were outdoors all the time. There was a lot of community development work and the community centre was a big thing in my childhood.

“I joined youth clubs, church groups. The people I looked up to were the community workers, the youth workers. It wasn’t ‘what is your problem, how are we going to fix it?’ It was ‘what is your talent, how do we support that.’”

She had a “notion” she says, to be a social worker, trained in Edinburgh and worked for nine years for local authorities; Glasgow, then Renfrewshire, before joining Quarriers in 2000.

She loved being a social worker and manager she said. “It was a broad experience. I always wanted to work in groups of people. If I had eight girls involved with the Children’s Panel I’d be hiring a minibus and taking them to Loch Lomond. When we started to separate children from families it all got harder to do,” she adds.

She began wanting to do more to keep families together. Children in bad situations often just want their parents to be helped, she says. Quarriers let her do this: She worked for the charity in Easterhouse designing a resource service for families facing multiple problem, and spent nine years with them in total before moving to Barnardo’s as assistant director of children’s services.

She stepped up to children’s services director when she moved to Children 1st four years ago and then at the end of last year became interim chief executive when former chief executive Alison Todd took leave to adopt.

Now, she sees herself as a custodian, she says. But she also has a secret weapon in her battle to make Scotland a “trauma-informed” nation.

She fishes out the kitbag that Children 1st workers take into schools, and announces; “children are inherently kind and compassionate. Headteachers have said ‘this little bag changed my school’.”

It contains cards to help children explain how they feel with animals and birds paired with abstract concepts such as courage, love, hope and anger. There is a colour sheet representing moods for those who find it harder to express what they are feeling. There is a talking stick, puppets and a bottle of “calming” geranium and lavender oil.

Ms Glasgow explains how children whose parents are struggling with alcohol problems have used it to express that they want to give their mother courage. They have used the robin card to give them courage to talk, whispered to the wolf the things they cannot say and had the wolf say it for them.

She is messianic about the impact it has, and in about five minutes has more or less persuaded me the revolutionary tool could change Scotland.

“Imagine if we had a nation of grown-ups who could talk about how they feel,” she says. “We would have a lot less drug use, people in prison, violence and abuse.”

Every Children 1st practitioner has a kit bag, she says, and over the next five years she wants them to be shared in schools across Scotland.

But the need remains enormous, she says. “People think if something really bad happened to your child you could get support but that’s not the case. There’s a waiting list.

“There are huge gaps and we have to move away from doing things to, or for, families and work with them. What we have been doing up until now as a country hasn’t worked.”