Dr. Anna Luise Kirkengen, professor in family medicine at the Universities of Tromso and Trondheim, reviewed this book for the Kaiser Permanente Journal in Fall 2011. The 298-page can be purchased on Dr. Helander's site for $20.
In her review Dr. Kirkengen writes:
Lost Lives is a book of great passion and meticulous documentation. It discusses teh range and amount, locally, nationally, and globally, of childhood violation. It makes evident how violated children's health is impaired and plays out in subsequent everyday medical encounters. The book combines individual and global perspectives and integrates medical, psychological and relational facts and data in a reflection about the origins and impacts of a global phenomenon: the violation of children, rightly defined as a pandemic.
From the back cover of the book:
Violence against children takes place across all countries and all cultural and economic strata. Drawing on information from 185 countries and a 35-year long experience of international work, the author of this book estimates that three out four persons living now have been victims of interpersonal or collective violence before the age of 18. Half of all children experience abuse. Over one billion children in the developing countries are at present victims of poverty-related, serious neglect and deprivation. Today, in the world, one child out of four ‒ some 590 million ‒ live without parental care: some on the street, others as bonded labour, soldiers, prostitutes, refugees, orphans, or are being trafficked. Community violence, wars and democides take a terrible toll. Violence against children is pandemic, but has remained unrecognied.
Helander describes the severe health and social sequels for victims of childhood violence: increased frequency of common somatic and mental diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse, criminal violence, and the irreparable damage to cells and functions of the brain. The resulting diseases and disabilities increase the victims’ need of health care, and reduce their work capacity. Lives are prematurely lost; for those surviving the quality of life is impaired. The present and projected costs of interpersonal and collective violence substantially reduce the world’s combined potential GDP.
The roots of violent behaviour are analyzed: why are people maltreating children, are there any determinants among their health or genetic factors; or in their social, economic and cultural environment? What do we know about the historic “inheritance” of violence? Violence against children is immoral, these acts are linked to disturbed functions or destruction of brain structures related to moral cognition, identifiable even at the molecular level; and of the failure of integration of complex brain processes; these are reviewed.The author criticizes the lack of preventive efforts made by governments and the failure of the U.N Human Rights Covenants and Conventions to protect children in the 140 countries, which have opted out of key provisions of these legally binding treaties. Lost Lives provides a disturbing account of the reality of childhood violence, and proposes a universal, community-based prevention programme.
Einar Helander graduated as MD in 1953 and took a PhD in biochemistry in 1957, and has held posts as university professor in Sweden. For six years he was a senior consultant to the Swedish Government's Board of Health and Welfare. He has been a scientist at the U.S. National Institute of Health at Bethesda, Md. In 1967, he started as consultant to the World Health Organization’s European Office. In 1974, he was recruited as Chief Medical Officer for the Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation Programme at WHO’s Headquarters in Geneva. He has also been Medical Director at the U. N. agencies in Rome. He then held a senior post at the U.N. Development Programme, New York, until 1998, and has been a consultant to the World Bank. For four years he was a visiting professor at The All-India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi. He is well known for creating international community-based health and social programmes and for authoring a detailed field manual, which is translated to over 50 languages, and used in over 100 countries. He is now Professor of International Health and Social Policies at the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, a University at Lisbon, Portugal.
