Listen to thisIt can’t be easy for kids to live in a group home. At a time when life isn’t going all that well for whatever reason, we ask kids to live in a place with a bunch of other kids and allow non-familial adults to take care of them. We tell them what the rules are, what is expected of them, what they can and cannot do, and how to resolve any issues that they might be encountering along the way. We expect them to continue to function in “normal” routines, such as attending and performing in school, joining others at the dinner table, and going to bed at a certain time. We determine when they eat, what they eat, and where they eat. We provide them with a bedroom so that they have some private space, but we enter their bedroom at will, and very often we are not able to mask the fact that their bedroom was someone else’s only a few days ago.
We also try hard to make their experience as comfortable as possible. We tell them that for the time being, this is where they live, and so in a sense at least it is their home. Please respect your home, don’t damage things, and be respectful of others living here. We assure kids that our rules and expectations mirror what might (or ought to) be in place in a family home, or in an independent place of living in the community. We offer our support to kids for those moments when they just can’t cope, and we try, as best as we can, to remain empathetic towards their family situations, their personal and psycho-social struggles, and their many failures. We emphasize their successes, however small they might be at times, and we focus on their strengths and competencies whenever we can.
Recognizing that the scenario is imperfect, we engage kids in relational ways, offering our presence, our guidance, and our nurture as a way of mitigating the perils of the physical and social milieu. Of course, even in this context we create many contradictions for kids; we ask for their trust, but we maintain vigilance in our monitoring and supervision of their activities. We express our commitment to their well being, but we ensure that we maintain professional boundaries that pre-empt friendship, reflect professional goals and objectives, and rule out unconditional love.
I suppose somewhere in the strange and unusual world of residential care it all makes sense; sort of, and even then, the evidence is hardly compelling. Still, I am prepared to accept all of the contradictions, the dialectics, and the absurdities of residential care with the exception of one: the staff office. We have come to unconditionally accept the need for a staff office in the group home, and yet this is by far the most institutional feature of the place. But it’s not just institutionalism that I object to. Staff offices contradict the very essence of child and youth work, and their presence undermines the very ethos of the profession. Why, you ask? Well, let me point out the obvious.
One would expect to find an “office” when visiting the doctor. Perhaps the dentist. Maybe the psychologist. Certainly at the counseling centre, the school and the probation office. In fact, one would expect to find an office at just about any place we go to for the purpose of receiving a specific service. This also includes banks, lawyers, child care centres, government facilities, hospitals, and many places of business. But what is an office? It’s a place that is designated for a specific purpose, one that is outside of the happenings in its immediate vicinity. Offices serve to separate, to distinguish, to remove, to divide, to create barriers, to prevent, to protect, and to withhold. They are visibly designated for this purpose. Everyone knows when we step from a common space into an office. The rules are different, and specific to whoever occupies that office. We lower our voices, we take on a more formal posture, we recognize and are conscious that we are in someone else’s space. We have stepped out of space we feel entitled to and stepped into space we feel conspicuous in.
Offices are by definition places of work. In offices, work is administered, organized, evaluated, designated, allocated and monitored. In these spaces, records of the work that has already taken place are often kept, more records are generated, plans are made for more work to be done and how it will be done, and records are kept of those plans as well. As a result of their role, offices are the spatial equivalent of private property in the most reactionary articulations of capitalism. In this sense, they are spaces and places of enormous power, and they make no secret of this. In fact, “being sent to the office” in schools is another way of being stripped naked of one’s autonomy and subjected to the “invisible hand” of intimidation, demonstration of authority, and exploitation of personal vulnerability.
Offices are the opposite of life spaces. We leave our life spaces to go to the office. Before we leave home, we dress according to office standards, we take with us material that is useful only in the context of the office, and we say goodbye to those we leave behind at home. Going to the office means exiting our life space and entering a zone in which all that we are, all that we know, and all that we feel becomes marginalized by a temporary identity that is entirely tied to its spatial context. An office is not really complete until it has not only a desk, but someone behind that desk as well. Nowhere does the commodification of the human spirit and identity unfold more surgically than in the office. We are, along with that desk, part of the furniture.
Why do group homes have offices? Because we need somewhere to store files? Because we need somewhere safe to lock up medication and sharp objects? Because we need to be able to protect the privacy of clients by having a space to have private phone calls or private conversations? These are logistical issues that do in fact require safe and practical responses. It is ever so easy to find the answer for these issues in the office. But at what cost?
From a child's perspective, the office is a mysterious place. It’s where the adults are, where they talk about me, where they make plans for me, where they decide on consequences for me, where they make fun of me, where they “vent” about me. It’s where I need to be, as often as possible, so that I am in on the secret no matter how painful. It’s where I need to be as often as possible, so that I can be seen as connected to the invisible hand of the power-space. It’s where I need to be to quell my fear of what I don’t know, can’t access, and am excluded from.
Children and youth have vivid imaginations, and almost always an intuitive capacity to know the difference between words and actions. All the talk about caring, about normalizing, about relationships, and about home fade into the abyss of hypocrisy in the presence of the office. It does not matter whether we are in the office or on the proverbial floor. It does matter, however, that this dichotomy exists – the office versus the floor. The barrier between the two is explicit and ever present. You have an exit, I do not. You have a space, I do not. You have power, I do not. Like a benevolent dictator, you may grace me with an audience in your hall of power, your temple of authority, your cavern of secrecy. But it is yours, not mine, and much like the welfare state did in the face of the rampant inequities of capitalism, it serves to keep me complacent but never invested. I can’t own a share of this space. I can only drool or tremble in the face of its commanding presence.
For the child and youth worker, the office is much like the demon Mara chasing after the young Siddhartha. It promises knowledge, solutions to logistical challenges, and legitimacy for the profession itself, and lures us into believing that this is real. For the more conscientious child and youth workers, avoiding the office and spending as much time as possible on the floor mirrors the young Siddharta’s resistance to the temptations of Mara. This is virtuous but ineffective. With our resistance we accentuate its presence; it becomes omnipresent.
Child and youth work, and especially residential child and youth work, is about being with, joining, traveling with, exploring with, and experiencing with children and youth. It is about togetherness, about learning about each other and ourselves, and about managing the consequences of what we find out. Offices are about hierarchy, separation, exclusivity, secrecy, and the demonstration of power. In a group home, we eliminate mould when we find it. We bleach the counters to keep away germs. We wash every piece of clothing, bedding, and fabric to kill those lice and their offspring. Why are we not tearing down the walls to eradicate this source of wretchedness in the places we make kids live?
