Listen to thisIt is no secret to anyone these days that all of us are under surveillance pretty much all the time. Whether our mobile phones are listening to our conversations, or we pay somewhere with a credit card, or walk around in cities where cameras are installed everywhere these days, our every move is translated into digital units that are stored somewhere, accessible to someone, and used to not only profile us as individuals, and to aggregate us collectively in some constructed ‘community’, but also to influence us, to determine our economic behaviour, and to assess the risk we may pose to those controlling the levers of power and wealth. These are not conspiracy theories. They are simply facts of life in the 21st century, and the degree of surveillance we are under is ever expanding. Not even George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 envisioned the level of surveillance we are exposed to.
The concept of surveillance has been theorized in many ways and in considerable depth. My friend and colleague Dr. Idil Abdillahi wrote a brilliant book about the surveillance of Black women in North America[1]. In fact, racism and surveillance are deeply connected and mutually enabling. We saw massive surveillance efforts of Muslims during the Gulf Wars, after 9/11, and we are again seeing it now in light of Israeli genocidal activity in Palestine, despite Palestinians being the victims of genocide in this case.
Herein lies the connection to fear; often surveillance is a mechanism to mitigate fear of the other, of the unknown, or of one’s own constructed prejudice. In fact, every regime of terror, from Nero’s Roman Empire to the fascists in Italy and Germany, the Stalinists in the Soviet Union, the white oppressors in South Africa, and the Israeli violent state machine has used surveillance as a core tool to maintain power and control, to oppress, and to diminish both the material context and the humanity of those perceived as a threat.
For all these reasons, it seems important to be very careful about surveillance in child and youth care settings. It would seem odd to discover that the very same mechanism used to oppress, contain, and diminish across local and global geographies is also used to manage the healing context of child and youth care settings. For me, this raises the question of how we assess the level of surveillance, its contexts and manifestations, and its impacts in child and youth care settings. How do we know whether we are inadvertently replicating the mechanisms of oppression? What complicates matters (as it often does) is language. In many child and youth care settings, and particularly in residential care settings, we don’t really talk about surveillance. We talk instead about supervision, a term that has come to have two very distinct meanings. On the one hand, we refer to supervision as the process by which we mentor, teach, guide, coach and reflect with practitioners on the work that we do. In this context, supervision is a positive, developmental concept meant to enhance capacity and quality of practices. On the other hand, we also use the term supervision to denote watching people, most notably young people receiving our services. In residential settings, staff are asked to supervise the kids while they might be watching a movie in the living room, or preparing dinner in the kitchen, or while they are out in the community. Ideally, of course, supervision in this form is an active process that extends well beyond watching or observing people. We supervise while hanging out with young people, we supervise while participating in preparing the meal in the kitchen or while watching the movie with the young people and share with them emotional and verbal reactions to what we see. In practice, however, this is not always the case, and a great deal of our supervision is really just a thinly disguised form of surveillance. The goal is to watch young people, know their whereabouts, observe their activities, their interactions, and their decision-making and ultimately be present to intervene when they do something we do not approve of. The data we gather while supervising young people is collected, analyzed, and ultimately forms the basis of assessments, perspectives on the identity, personality, and moral character of the young person, and used to determine the Plan of Care or the treatment plan. In fact, life altering decisions are made about young people based on the data collected from watching them, including whether we might recommend their return home to family or a placement at a yet more intrusive and surveillance-oriented program instead.
This form of supervision or surveillance is not always limited to practitioners and young people. Sometimes, it extends to management and practitioners, and even practitioners and practitioners as well. In residential care settings where everyone is supervised all the time, and everyone is responsible for reporting the data collected from supervising others, we have essentially created a closed surveillance system that mirrors much larger and more open surveillance systems in society at large. This is itself concerning enough. However, what complicates matters is the ambiguity associated with how we use the data collected through surveillance in these settings. Stalin in the Soviet Union was very clear about the purpose of the data and therefore about how it was to be interpreted. When the data showed resistance, opposing viewpoints, or activities that fell outside of the goals of the regime, individuals were to be banished, murdered, or tortured. The purpose of surveillance was to optimize and render efficient the investment of violence for the purpose of protecting and even strengthening the regime. In child and youth care settings, the purpose of the data collected is less clear. Is it to ensure we are organizing ourselves to maintain a safe environment? Is it to allow us to pathologize young people and even our colleagues based on the selective reporting of what we have observed? Is it to find rationale for clinical prognoses? Or is it to eliminate behaviours, activities, and ways of being that might make our jobs more difficult?
In our everyday lives, we live in open societal systems where the diversity of spaces, relationships, opportunities, and barriers for mobility are enormous. Although I very much doubt this is actually the case, we can convince ourselves that we can escape the gaze of surveillance from time to time. We can pay for things in cash, we can spend time in nature where there are fewer cameras watching us, we can turn off our mobile phones and perhaps even leave them at home when we go out. In short, we can resist surveillance, and even if in the end it turns out we are not very good at resisting surveillance, the process of resistance is itself of value and reminds us of our human spirit to fight. Many child and youth care settings, and notably residential settings (but also schools, hospitals, drop-in programs) are closed surveillance settings. This means that there is no escaping the gaze of surveillance. We must submit to surveillance and set aside our human spirit to fight. In short, we become objects that are observed, described, and ultimately moved around based on the decisions of others. Our autonomy and subjectivity are essentially silenced. And yet it is precisely in this context that child and youth care practice is asking practitioners to support young people and each other to build autonomy, to further pride in identity, and to enable growth and independence.
Let’s be clear: asking someone to be as they are while at the same time demanding that they be as we expect them to be is a form of torture, an invitation to failure, and a trap for coercive punishment. We cannot both diminish and advance someone’s humanity using systematic mechanisms such as surveillance on the one hand and treatment on the other. In fact, it is profoundly naïve to think that the things we do in our practice that may not be consistently mutually reinforcing (surveillance and treatment or the promotion of healing) can nevertheless coexist independently. In reality, one dynamic is always the dominate one and transforms the other in its own image. The risk, and in my view the common outcome, is that surveillance is dominant and transforms treatment in its own image, so that treatment itself becomes just another form of surveillance.
Diminishing humanity is an act of doing harm. Surveillance does precisely that, be that in our closed child and youth care settings or at much larger scales in open society. Those subjected to surveillance experience themselves as less than human, objectified and as an aesthetic in the gaze of others. They cannot, and they will not, become the human they wish to be based on their own agency. Surveillance can be justified in the name of preventing acute risk and immanence of death or serious incapacitation. But beyond that, surveillance is a misguided strategy born out of fear, liability, privileged risk mitigation, and an aversion to the many ways of being in this world. Surveillance is inherently not relational. It is coercive and violent.
Here is my challenge to everyone who works in, supervises, or otherwise makes decisions about closed child and youth care settings (specialized classrooms in schools, live-in treatment programs, after school programs, etc.). Can you identify the surveillance mechanisms in your own setting? Can you engage in discussion with your staff and with young people about the purpose of those mechanisms? Can you identify potential harms caused by these mechanisms? And have you done your due diligence and read up a little on how the very worst of history used (and continues to use) that very same idea of surveillance in its pursuit of death and destruction? Can you see the parallels?
[1] Abdillahi, I. (2022). Black women under state surveillance, poverty, & the violence of social assistance. ARP Books.
