Listen to thisEvery now and again, I fall back on particular phrases or ideas to help me make sense of some of the things I come across. One of the most enduring of these is Henry Maier’s notion that group care practitioners are faced with providing primary care in secondary settings. By this he means that the demands of the wider organisation often compete with or dominate the task of providing developmental care to youth. In the same chapter in which he raises this tension, Maier also attests to the quality of care experienced by children and youth as being bound up with the quality of care encountered by their carers and he quotes Bronfenbrenner in asking, “Who cares for the carers?”
A couple of situations have come to my attention recently, which have brought these phrases back into my head. The first of these involved a worker, the latest in a long line, caught up in an inquiry into historical abuse. In some respects he was one of the lucky ones and was allowed to return to work within a couple of months. For others, this process has taken years. The second case involves a home I know in which a committed and able manager was stood down and an investigation into management practices instituted.
Ostensibly, decisive management actions of this sort will be claimed to be legitimate in the wake of the various inquiries into child abuse, all of which criticised external management structures for failing to act in response to complaints and concerns. However, in neither of these situations were children at risk. Quite cynically though, that is not the primary concern of many organisations in this climate of unsophisticated managerialism. Many organisations and individuals within these are quite explicitly driven by an imperative to ensure that if any questions are asked ten years down the line, they will be able to show that a case has been fully investigated, i's dotted and t's crossed. That approach might or might not serve the purpose of covering the backs of those in positions of power. However, it most certainly destroys individuals caught up in that back-covering exercise. It also displays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of group care. To think that the organic and humanistic entity that is a group care centre can be subject to an endless cycle of investigation, without this destabilising and distorting the developmental essence of the task, beggars belief.
Undoubtedly, the discovery of abuse in group care settings has demanded a greater awareness and attention to ensuring that nothing on the same scale happens again. Unquestionably too, this imperative presents organisations with very real dilemmas. However, there is no moral authority in one-dimensional managerial approaches which seek to respond to abuse through bullying and further abuse at organisational level. Who indeed cares for the carers? We need to sort this question out if we are serious about providing appropriate care to children and youth.
Note
Maier, Henry. Primary care in secondary settings: inherent strains, in Fulcher, L. C. and Ainsworth, F. (1985) Group Care Practice with Children. London: Tavistock.
