BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine: Interview with Rukhiya Budden

BBC Radio 2

This episode of BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine program features an interview with Rukhiya Budden, who grew up in an orphanage in Kenya. The episode explains that the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) issued a statement that orphanages are bad for children and explores why this is so. In the interview, Budden tells her story of being placed in an orphanage as a child in Kenya when her mother was unable to care for her, and the conditions and treatment she experienced and witnessed while in the institution, including chronic neglect and abuse. She also explains the ways in which the children were dressed up and forced to sing for visitors to the orphanage and describes feeling as though she was an animal at a zoo. Budden lists the diseases she acquired while at the institution and tells of the physical and sexual abuse that children faced there. The segment begins at 01:07:58 and ends at 01:20:41.