Listen to thisI spend about an hour a day scouring news wires around the world for news items relating to work with children youth and families. The harvest of this is usually a modest six or seven items which are added each day to CYC-Net’s NewsDesk (which you can conveniently pick up in two-day “grabs" on our Quicknews page – today’s and yesterday’s news).
I manage to limit this news to material which I think would be interesting to people who work with troubled kids. One could classify this in several ways: there is news on what makes kids tick, what contributes to things going well – and to things going wrong, and what people try in the way of prevention and intervention. One could also classify it in terms of “problem" areas like violence, substance use, mental illness, etc. There are often in-depth looks at intervention programs with drug-involved kids, with youth justice involved kids, with marginalised students in schools ...
Sadly there is almost no such news of Child and Youth Care work, of people who work with children, youth and families in residential and community programs. When such work is featured it is virtually always about programs that are short-changing kids, failing to offer effective or goal-directed programming, applying demeaning or humiliating methods, or frankly abusing and traumatising kids. This is particularly so in stories about youth detention programs and Child and Youth Care treatment programs. This is not a reflection of my selection, but of what news media publish. And news media will always publish (a) what they hear and (b) what their readers want to hear.
Headlines in July 2001 alone included: shelter for kids plagued with problems, panel favors closing youth lockup, prison inspector condemns youth institution staff, misconduct or poor program at youth facility, abuse allegations rock youth center in Samoa, background check law leads to child-care firings, children at risk need a home – not a revolving door, detention centers becoming warehouses for mentally ill youth, deaths prompt call to regulate youth camps, supervised child visits criticised in report, employees at school for troubled youths fired, use of drugs to control kids worries specialists ...
When it was announced a few weeks ago that young Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the killers of young Jamie Bulger in Britain eight years ago, were going to be released from their secure holding facilities, there was a feeding frenzy in the British media. This largely concentrated on a rehash of the gory details of the killing, and, perhaps more, on the fact that the government would keep the killers' identities and whereabouts secret so that no avenging killers or vigilante groups could get at them. News media focussed mostly on the quite understandable but much extolled bitterness of Jamie’s mother who spoke of betrayal and revenge, words which fired news reporters to speculate rather childishly on who would be first to “out" the boys.
Against this background, there appeared one of those rare and thoughtful observations on the subject. Paul Kelso, writing in The Guardian, described intelligently and objectively the nature of the treatment which Thompson and Venables had undergone in their separate local authority secure units ("the antithesis of young offenders' institutes which are essentially child jails structured along adult lines"). He described the secure unit programs which offered “high standards of education and therapy and extended periods of useful activity and treatment". Even though these units accommodate rapists, murderers, arsonists and youth with other serious behavioural problems, the programmes are responsive to “children demonstrating self-control, an awareness of the consequences of their actions and other good behaviour." The time-table includes up to six hours of school lessons a day. Both Thompson and Venables clearly benefitted from this treatment.
Kelso concluded his report like this: “While the decision to release the boys will provoke outrage in some quarters, those involved in the administration of youth justice will see their progress as a mark of success. To rehabilitate two child killers sufficiently that the parole board – not a sentimental body – feels they pose no risk to society is no small achievement."
That statement was one of only half-a-dozen positive comments on programs for troubled kids that I had read in the news media of the world in the whole of the previous year.
Why should this be? I think that society does not like to be reminded of its own failures, so it represses from its corporate mind the programs which are called on to help those youngsters and their families, or if that fails, the programs are stigmatised. Whichever, society is hostile to programs like ours. In general, people do not want programs to be sited near them, they do not want to hear about them, they do not want their children to play with our children, and they are shrill in their accusations and judgements when things go wrong. The standard movie cliché about juvenile hall, youth treatment facilities and foster care is that such services are horrors and threats. The heroes in movies will always rescue kids from the villains of the social services. So we don’t make the newspapers, except for the bad news page.
And to what extent is this our fault? How often do we initiate a discourse with the society we serve? Yes, we do ask for funds, and we do say generally favourable things about ourselves in our Annual Reports. But beyond that do we not have, though the news media, some important responsibilities for informing and reporting back to society? It is, surely, our job to tell society what we have learned from our practice about kids and families and communities. It is, surely, our job to inform our city and state and government what Child and Youth Care services need in order to do our work more effectively. And then it is our job to let everyone know how well we succeed, how many families and young people are coping today where formerly they were at risk and failing.
Do we tell the media of our new plans, new staff members, new ideas? Considerations of privacy and ethics assumed, do we go out of our way to inform our local press as to how effective our prevention work is, how we go about our work, how we aim at short-term interventions, how many clients make gains and succeed? I am sure that we make good news daily in our practice, but if we don’t spread this news ourselves, people will never hear it. If we don’t get more objective information out there, clients will continue to enter our programs at the disadvantage of having heard only the bad press.
Last week, Ramsay Youth Services, Inc. announced its Second Quarter results for 2001. The President and CEO of Ramsay Youth Services stated, “We are very pleased with our second quarter and mid year results, they reflect our continued success in growing the specialized treatment areas of the business including the expansion of our mental health and substance abuse programs." The success referred to (this was, of course, a business report) was in terms of total revenues of $33,840,000 for the quarter, an increase of 34% over total revenues of $25,257,000 from the same period of the prior year ... and several more pages of financial detail.
Ramsay shareholders were entitled to receive this report and no doubt pleased with its good tidings. But the world is entitled also to our reporting – and would it not be pleased to hear more of our achievements and successes so that the “accounts" of “Child and Youth Care Work, Inc" reflected a more positive balance?
If we screw up all the time then we deserve the bad press. But there is no need for us to be inarticulate about the good work we do. Let's hear it for the programs and the kids and families who are doing OK.
BG
