This is my review of The Children's Inquiry (July 2022) by Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley - two of the three co-founders of UsforThem.co.uk.
The book and other work of UsForThem.co.uk have even greater significance in June 2023 after horrifying information increasingly emerging in the past year, particularly:
the appalling crisis of mental health in children and young people, predicted by many,
and the UK Government’s spying on, smearing and censoring activists such as Kingsley and other important leaders campaigning against and questioning Covid lockdowns, restrictions and other criminal abuses of political power - see for example the Daily Telegraph 6th 2023 June article: telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/05/molly-kingsley-interview-covid-19-government-extremist/ -
and here if you can’t see because of the paywall - pressreader.com/uk/features/20230606/281526525448004
I wrote my review immediately after the book's publication June 2022. The TimeForRecovery organisation published a slightly edited and shorter version on their website on 18 Jul 2022 - timeforrecovery.org/how-lockdowns-harmed-our-children-and-helped-some-harm-themselves/.
The Children's Inquiry - Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley (2022)
Please read this book. Share and discuss it with family, friends and colleagues.
Read it and weep. Weep for the millions of children we've failed to cherish, protect and nurture for the past two-and-a-half years.
Weep because this has been happening for much longer.
Weep because our governments and big businesses have built falsehoods to replace healthy parenting evolved over millennia, and have addicted our children to technologies and gambling; to sugary processed diets; and have leveraged childhood trauma and self-loathing for political and financial purposes. It's wilful, skilful, and systemic. And mostly hidden.
In these few hundred words I can summarise only a tiny fraction of the evidence, humanity and practical power of The Children's Inquiry. So I can best mainly reflect on this hugely important book in my own words, informed by my life and work; in suicide, health and education.
Please note there are references to suicide below, so if you are vulnerable in this respect please be careful.
Illness and death are different for children
It's usually sad when someone old dies, especially for the bereaved. It's more sad when a less elderly person dies. But when a child dies. Think about it.
And when a child kills himself or herself. Steps in front of a train, or searches on social media for other methods. Can you begin to imagine? Unlikely, unless you've lived it.
Adults who are not parents, and parents who haven't experienced childhood self-harm, can't imagine children cutting their own bodies, and the blood and the bandaging, and the dangerously secret shame, and hiding the scarring; these children so terrified by what's in their heads.
Big boys don't cry. Girls and boys should be like airbrushed celebrities and cartoon warriors and princesses. Happiness can be bought, usually on credit. Climbing trees is too dangerous. This is the nonsense our children try to make into sense and meaning.
For generations before the pandemic, children have been addicted to sugar and processed foods, causing harmful inflammation in their growing minds and bodies, persisting into adulthood addictions and ill-health. For a generation, children are also addicted to smartphones and screen technologies too, because that's how it's all designed.
Now think about school closures and remote learning. Forcing children to endure so much screen technology that is child abuse. Forcing children to stop exercising and playing. Stop singing, dancing, drama and sports. All also child abuse.
The Children's Enquiry explains and proves that the UK's leading experts in children's welfare and health predicted the harms to children and young people at the outset of the pandemic lockdowns, rules, restrictions and school closures. These warnings were ignored, censored and undermined by forces that are sinister, negligent or worse.
The masking of children and removing children's freedoms were far more extreme and enduring than adult restrictions. And the double-standards, especially laughing bare-faced politicians visiting masked children for PR and news stories, are all profoundly disturbing.
Understanding expressions on people's faces is an incredible human evolutionary capability and necessity, and part of non-verbal communications. In babies too especially. We sense mood and feelings from physical presence. Even smell. Think about face-masks and what face-masking does for children and youngsters. Think about what this dehumanising does to people - especially little children - especially the very sensitive and neurodiverse and the deaf and the abused and raped and tortured - yes even these little children.
Think about what face-masking does for cooperation and mutual understanding and trust.
Think about who benefits from all the lockdowns and other measures.
We have no idea yet how deep the damage is
How many more children will be cutting themselves after what's been done to them in the past two-and-a-half-years?
How many more children will be killing themselves than before our already overwhelmed health services and always oddly motivated broadcasters and mainstream media became unrecognisable from those same services in 2019?
Do you think some vulnerable children might have disappeared from the education system during the school closures and have never returned? In fact 94% of vulnerable UK children failed attend school as invited during the closures, and 100,000 remain missing from the system now, and nobody knows what's happened to them.
This is just one of the hundreds of shocking facts in The Children's Inquiry, which is 272 pages of densely packed, robustly referenced information (504 references), all brilliantly written and constructed. This book is infinitely more than a story. It's guide for how we fix humanity and the planet.
Do you think that child abusive head trauma cases increased in the pandemic measures? Yes they did; dramatically and very quickly evidenced in the first lockdown.
Very early in the lockdowns and school closures there was evidence that children are not seriously at risk from Covid, nor are they 'superspreaders', and yet pandemic rules for children were harsher than for older people.
Until the wickedness of those rules is widely understood and completely reversed, the wickedness will persist.
Knowing how many children and teenagers are contemplating suicide, not even talking to their friends about it, let alone their parents or teachers, has become a deeper mystery than ever. The pandemic measures further silenced what was already unspoken and and unheard, and the biggest killer of young people.
While every suicide is different, isolation and withdrawal are extremely dangerous final stages in the typical spiral from depression and anxiety to suicide ideation, to the planning and deciding of suicide methods. Think about the isolating effects of face-masks, lockdown measures, school closures, shame and guilt, in mainstream media and children's TV. Children are 'vectors' for transmission was and remains official news. The dehumanising and collateral damaging of children to be 'vectors'. Not a human. Sub-human. And now a traumatically embedded belief of millions of children, part conscious part unconscious, in ways we can't yet know, which takes years to emerge, if ever for some.
And giving children the responsibility and blame for when family members and all other people die. And then forcing restrictive punishing torturous measures upon children. Measures that so obviously, although to far too few adults, breach international laws on children's rights.
Play was ended. Playgrounds closed with police tape. Play and exercise became against the law, and added to the deep embedded new beliefs of millions of our children.
Instead children became the footballs and the killing fields, as the egomaniacs in government, parliament, unions and social media argued about who was winning political battles. And so still the maniacs argue, blind to the children. Adults playing games with the health and lives of our children.
The army came to test children for disease. Imagine. Children are diseased and need to be tested constantly by the army, was the messaging via trusted media, and via manipulated parents and society too.
Read Laura Dodsworth's brave and brilliant 2021 book: A State of Fear. It explains the use of behavioural psychology and 'psyops' against populations by governments and corporations, and lots else. (amazon.co.uk/State-Fear-government-weaponised-Covid-19/dp/1780667205)
Politicians with no understanding of childhood growth, and no experience of raising children in the normal world, or at all, said it's possible to 'pause' a child's development. And we have no idea now of the damage to our children, and no feasible political plans or budgets to remedy the harms. UK children suffered more in the pandemic than every European nation except Italy, compounding prior failings, whereby pre-pandemic UK child wellbeing was worse than dozens of other countries.
Somehow adult populations, especially UK, were and continue to be persuaded that children are so resilient and adaptable that even babies and toddlers can be collateral damage and sacrificial human capital in order for adults to feel safer and less fearful, and to feel more virtuous, in this 'mass formation' hypnosis, this nightmarish spell, of harming our own children.
So it became more important that a great-grandmother be protected than her great-grandchild. Every frightened adult became more precious than every child. The book refers to the 'Inversion of Nature'. Do you see it?
Political power does not self-regulate
The Children's Inquiry will help adults understand that children are being harmed, including harming and killing themselves, while adults are obsessing about their own needs, wants, fears and divisions.
Most politicians love it when populations are fearful and divided, and obsessing about shopping and other illusions of happiness. And most politicians don't really care about children who self-harm and then go on to kill themselves. Because politicians don't understand these things. They just understand politics and their own very comfortable bubbles.
Many political leaders don't have children, let alone experience child self-cutting or eating disorders as a suicide method, although ironically and very significantly, many political leaders (and corporate and institutional leaders) are themselves damaged as young children; the products of aspirational wealthy parents and boarding schools, which is another very relevant story.
Governments since their beginnings have ruled by fear and division. Follow the money.
Please buy or borrow The Children's Inquiry. Read it, and share and discuss it with family, friends and colleagues.
Be the change. Be the loving ripples. Look after our children.
About the authors
Firstly, in their own words: "Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley are parents, writers and co-founders of UsForThem. Together with others in the UsForThem team [including co-founder Christine Brett] they've led multiple national political, media and letter writing campaigns advocating for children to be prioritised during the pandemic. They write frequently for national print and online media including the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph and The Critic and are regular commentators on issues impacting children."
Secondly, in my own words, I've understood for decades that great leadership takes responsibility when nobody else can and/or dares. And so besides its distressing and brilliantly practical content, The Children's Inquiry is also a story of uplifting inspirational leadership, and a guide for what we must change. I am in awe of and hugely grateful for the work of these wonderful people. Thank you.
For anyone wanting help with child suicide, self-harm or related concerns see the Papyrus organisation.
Please note that the above review was written nearly a year ago, and situations have changed quite a lot since then, in lots of ways.
Further to above, the 2022 book ‘Shame’, by Anna Brees
Subsequent to the above review, I urge you to read another hugely significant book, SHAME - When Journalists Stopped Listening, written and self-published by the independent journalist and journalism educationalist Anna Brees.
Anna Brees worked for 10 years for the BBC and ITV before becoming independent in 2017.
amazon.co.uk/SHAME-When-Journalists-Stopped-Listening/dp/B0BQ53XQXM
Thanks for reading this.
Alan Chapman
Health Coach and Educationalist.
Co-Founder of LiveWildLiveFree.org.
LiveWildLiveFree.org offers vast free resources on health and education, about personal and societal wellbeing, healing and transformation.