Listen to thisThinking back, my contact with Stefan was somewhat remote over those six months, yet it seems to have been a significant time for me. As a supervisor I found myself talking about him mostly, rather than with him. Yet even though our dialogue was conducted at one remove, so to speak, through my work with the front line staff, it was nonetheless in a very real sense a dialogue.
Stefan was admitted through the police court, which sounds much worse than it was. There was no crime. He was found on the streets, where passers by and shopkeepers usually assume the worst. “He’s up to no good," they would say of a fourteen-year-old who skulked around the market quarter, obviously not attending school, and surviving God knows how. The magistrate seems to have agreed, since he hung a basket of vague “status offences" around the boy’s neck “not at school, not disclosing his home address, no visible means of support “and so he arrived at the “Plant" -- the team’s odd name for the rather prosaically named “reception, remand and assessment centre". (As a reaction to its pejorative “warehouse" reputation, a former Head had told a staff meeting that he preferred to see the place as “a sort of production plant" where we make the most we can of the “raw material" presented to us. The staff was quite scathing about this at the time, but after the Head had moved on, they rather fondly adopted the “plant" image.) I digress.
I did do the initial interview with Stefan, and that was certainly unusual. He seemed entirely untroubled and matter-of-fact, while politely refusing to discuss anything of his background or origins. He was in no way recalcitrant, yet when I pressed him for information of where he had come from and of his family, he dispassionately declined to say anything. It seems an odd thing to say, but I felt that I had “nothing to trade" with this youngster. Let me explain. You know how a newly admitted youngster is often in trouble or angry or unhappy. One’s response to these things is often the first “link" we establish. In a way we “trade" the kid's trouble for our attention and helpfulness, or his anger for our understanding and respect. On this occasion Stefan seemed to “need" nothing from us, and I, in turn, felt that I had nothing to offer. There was just Stefan and me. This was a new experience for me.
It troubled a number of the staff who worked with him too. At first they thought he was cold (in the unfeeling, psychopathic sense) or maybe depressed, or hiding something (and therefore devious, uncooperative). But none of these perceptions survived our rigorous exploration in individual or group supervision. When we got our suppositions and shoot-from-the-hip interpretations out of the way, there was complete agreement that Stefan was genuine, rational, responsive and intact. We even got as far as agreeing that his lack of neediness was one of the things which troubled us most. “Needs" at least pointed the way to intervention and action. Even more, we acknowledged in supervision that a child's “neediness" somehow gave the care workers the upper hand in a way “we had some resource or “pull" which the kid wanted ... But Stephan, even at fourteen, seemed surprisingly mature and in control “un-needy.
Was he perhaps avoiding or escaping? The education staff had not managed to button him down. With no school records we couldn’t tell whether he was “ahead" or “behind", though his verbal skills were undeniably good for his age. Because of the vagaries of our educational system he couldn’t be accurately assigned to any school grade, so he ended up (we though inappropriately) in “shop". But even here he was obliging and agreeable. He seemed to consider every task or learning opportunity on its own merits, and then would engage and commit as he saw fit. So some shop teachers would see him as “superior" and “choosy" and others as “poised" and “discriminating" “but whichever, with Stefan there was clearly an absence of anxiety or poor function, so he avoided the labels which so often saw pupils transferred to “remedial" or “therapeutic" classes.
The on-line workers were divided. Some saw Stefan as “independent" and “interesting" while others used words like “aloof" or “intractable". When we explored these ideas in our discussions, we realised uncomfortably that he seemed to challenge our control. “We have nothing on him," one worker said, by which, when pressed, she admitted she meant that we had “no hold over him."
The boy’s inscrutability was probably the quality which most disconcerted the youth care workers. They were used to working with kids who needed a lot of “guiding and goading". Much of their jobs seemed to be “watching", “checking on", “chasing up" and “calming down" yet here was a youngster who was quite undemanding in these areas. One worker admitted that Stefan was the first boy she felt she had “looked up to", as she put it. The usual care worker roles were stripped away and one found oneself relating to Stefan almost on an adult-to-adult basis. This led to some profound shifts in our group supervision. One child care worker put it this way: “If one of the others were to put his foot on the coffee table, I would automatically yell at him and say “Get your damned foot off that table!” But I simply couldn’t talk that way to Stefan. He seems to command altogether more respect." To say that staff “practice habits" were challenged by this experience was to put it mildly. “It’s true, isn’t it," conceded one of the group. “We pay lip service to values like “respect" and “strengths" but we do break our own rules very easily when we are with our usual kids." Shame-faced agreement all round.
One of our most experienced relief workers confessed his discovery of another less-than-thoughtful aspect of his own style. He had been used striking up conversations with kids in free moments with off-the-cuff opening lines like “How–re you going?" or “How was school?" but with Stefan he felt these were trite and superficial questions. “If you want to say something to Stefan," he shared, “you really have to have something to say" “and again there were murmers of recognition, and more questions like “So why do we say those shallow and repetitive things to the other kids?"
I sat in a homework class one day observing Stefan. I had the feeling that he had lost interest “not that he was lacking in application or effort, but that the class was failing to stimulate him or engage him “that whatever it was he was looking for, he was not finding here. It was a helpless feeling; it was as if he knew what he needed and wanted “and none of us did.
Then one night he came up to me and said “Thank you for having me here with you all. I think I have learned a lot from you. Thank you." His use of the perfect tense was disconcerting, as though he had finished with us now. He appreciated our attention and hospitality and thinking ... and was going to move on. I was about to deliver one of those automatic lines, like “Don’t forget you’re here on a court order, you’d get into trouble if ..." but I bit my tongue. Instead, I wanted to say “Thank you for coming here to be with us; you have no idea what we've learned from you," ... but I didn’t. Normally at the loose end of an exchange with a kid I would probably just ruffle his hair and smile in parting. I surprised myself. I found myself shaking his hand with unexpected formality, as I might shake the hand of my employer, and saying “Thank you, Stefan."
It was a week or so later. I had gone to town on one of those extraordinary hunting and gathering exercises so common in group care work “to buy bus tickets or football boots or whatever. My eye suddenly caught Stefan, miles from where he should be, tog-bag over his shoulder, walking towards an inter-city bus. I was about to spring into action, follow him over the road, call out “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?"
I watched him hop on the bus. I didn’t see where the bus was heading. It disappeared in the traffic. I still had a lot of raw material waiting back at the Plant.
