Interview: A place to escape despair - Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder, Kids Company

This image is just one featured in an exhibition by young artists at the Tate Modern that has been organised by Kids Company, a charity that works with vulnerable children.

Launched last November, the exhibition aims to show the reality behind the myth of the "feral" child, shifting the blame away from children and towards society. "Children are not born criminals. If they turn to crime there are usually very good reasons," says Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder and director of the charity. "We did the exhibition because I was so fed up of children being criminalised."

The exhibition has helped to throw open the debate, attracting up to 500 visitors a day and sympathetic features in broadsheets including the Financial Times and The Guardian.

Batmanghelidjh, who had learning difficulties as a child, has 15 years' experience as a child psychologist in the UK and US. Born into a wealthy Iranian family in Tehran, she was granted asylum when she was nine, and had started working with vulnerable children by the time she was 14. She says the exhibition has been hugely important for the 1,000 four-to 19-year-old child artists who contributed to it, and to young visitors.

"For children who are forced to keep their lives secret from others, to have their experiences publicly validated in this way is really affirming."

She claims children's programmes try to protect children and skirt around harsher issues.

"What that does is make the child living in those conditions feel alienated as if they're somehow unusual or odd. But an exhibition like this allows for these children to feel that they're not alone," she says.

These children, and those that Kids Company works with, have little or no parental care, or may have parents with mental health problems, and are left to survive on their own.

Batmanghelidjh believes they are often let down by a system where professionals are forced to wait until children reach "such a picture of despair" they commit a crime, leading to a huge discrepancy between the number of children on the youth offending register and the child protection register.

"It's a perverse redistribution and professionals are forced to behave in ways they are not happy with."

She complains children with emotional problems may end up being off-loaded by health and social services if there is no psychological illness, but that even if they do manage to see a mental health professional, it may not be often enough to make a difference.

To tackle this, children who work with the multi-agency team at Kids Company can access, on a drop-in basis, a number of services under one roof.

The social workers, art and drama therapists, psychotherapists, youth workers and housing officers who help them get back on their feet are based at the charity's brightly decorated centre in Camberwell, south London, which has a music studio, art centre and aromatherapy area, as well as teaching and counselling rooms.

The nine-year-old charity also works with 21 schools, whose teachers refer children in the most need.

Batmanghelidjh, a qualified psychotherapist, delivers mental health training to staff herself. This enables them as a team to analyse why the behaviour happens in the first place and to deal with it therapeutically.

"The staff need to talk through their feelings," says Batmanghelidjh.

"Many children provoke anger in people. People end up wanting to take revenge emotionally. We don't allow that."

Yet there is another side to working with the children. When asked why she works with such challenging children, she says: "These children have a truth about them that I really like. They've reached such profound levels of pain and despair, but when you do help, they have an integrity that's breathtaking."

BACKGROUND - Career highlights

- Founder and executive director in 1996 of Kids Company, an organisation offering support to 4,500 vulnerable children in schools and at its youth centre, The Arches

- Founded school counselling project The Place To Be in 1992 initially in 11 primary schools with 250 trainee counsellors, therapists and artists

- Awards include Unsung Heroes Award, 2001 (Guild of Celebrities), Howard League Award 2003 for pioneering work with young people, and voted American College Teacher of the Year in 1990.