Delan Devakumar, Professor of Global Child Health and Co-Director of the Centre for
the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents at University College London (UCL),
UK, has always understood racism and what it is like to be discriminated against.
About a year before he was born, his parents’ house in Sri Lanka was burnt down. “It
was a targeted attack”, he says. “My father comes from the Tamil minority group.”
Later, as a south Asian boy growing up in north Wales, UK, he experienced racism first
hand and recalls how “in the 1980s and 90s there weren’t many people who looked like
us; being called names and sometimes physical acts of violence were more normal then”.