Listen to thisI try my best not to complain about things but sometimes I just can’t help it. So, this month I want to present several complaints about things related to child and youth services locally and globally in a short and sweet (or bitter) way, just to get them out there. If anyone is interested in talking more about these, feel free to get in touch. Here are my current complaints, in no particular order.
Orphanage tourism – Having just attended the FICE Congress in Croatia, I was reminded in a workshop that this issue continues to not only exist but is growing stronger. Orphanage tourism refers to missionary-style work with children and youth, typically in the global South targeting communities impacted by severe poverty. Africa is a favourite choice of missionaries, who go there and build orphanages (not always called that) for dozens and sometimes hundreds of children and youth. Of note is that these children and youth are rarely orphans. They have families, parents, siblings, and extended kinship networks, who often allow their children to be taken with the promise of a better life for them offered through the orphanage. This concept is in and of itself horrific, represents neocolonial patterns of thinking about racialized peoples, and in many cases end up being unregulated places of supposed care where children and youth are abused. What makes matters worse is the tourism associated with these places. In a combination of ‘white saviour’ and missionary delusion, people from the global North often pay a substantial fee to travel to these places, offer their services for a short period of time (sometimes a week, sometimes a month), and leave feeling like they have done something wonderful for poor, starving children. The economy underwriting this is worth billions, and such places are often protected by governments who are hesitant to get into arguments with the surprisingly powerful ‘owners’ of such orphanages. Phrases such as ‘government shuts down orphanage’ just don’t play well in media. My complaint is of course about the very existence of these places, and about the tourists and their naïve (and often racist) attitudes. But beyond that, my complaint extends to child and youth care post-secondary education which is largely silent on this issue, and which sometimes becomes complicit by arranging student trips to engage in orphanage tourism. For all the critical thinking we claim, we appear oddly complacent on this issue.
Child war casualties who don’t matter – When Russia invaded Ukraine, the response from child and youth organizations, including FICE, was swift and unqualified. We just had to do something for children and youth in Ukraine. And of course, I agree that we should be active in the child and youth service space in conflict zones. However, I am also conscious that such children and youth exist across many conflict zones and not all children and youth seem to matter equally. Of course, I must mention the literally thousands of young people who have died in Gaza, not to mention the tens of thousands who been injured or have lost members of their families, and the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes, schools, friends, recreational opportunities, social networks, access to food, protection from disease, and so much more. I have attended several child welfare-related conferences in different countries this year alone, and the sensitivity and outright fear of saying something that might offend one group or another has rendered these children and youth invisible. And Gaza is just one conflict setting that appears to never come up in our conversations. Does anyone even remember Eritrea and Ethiopia and the brutal war that was fought literally just months ago? Anyone care how those children are doing? And reaching a little further, do Rohingya still matter? Yes, they are still refugees in Bangladesh, still living with nothing in place, and children and youth are still suffering the consequences. Funny how quickly we moved on from that.
Talking about the needs of children and youth – I can’t help but notice that our rhetoric about responding to the needs of children and youth is deeply embedded in almost every speech, writing, and advocacy effort these days. And yet so little analysis exists that focuses on how we determine these needs, who is determining these needs, or what it means to have needs that aren’t being met. It all reminds me of twenty years ago, when it was common practice to talk about safety whenever we were running out of useful things to say. The general approach was that just about anything could be justified in the name of safety, including extreme containment measures, placing young people at great distances from their home communities, and even withdrawing fundamental rights to self-determination and participation. I can’t help but think the language of ‘needs’ is now doing pretty much the same thing. I also note that we rarely talk about the desires of young people, which presumably would give young people much more voice in decision-making compared to talking about needs, which are professionally determined.
The temptation to generate universal ideas – I was sure that we had thoroughly discredited the notion that we can universalize child and youth care concepts. The importance of context, so I thought, had been effectively demonstrated and we were not going to once again try and impose what are primarily Eurocentric ideas and concepts on everybody. How wrong I was. It turns out we are right back to trying to develop universal responses to issues and challenges in child and youth services. Perhaps most obviously we are doing this in the context of the valorization of family-based care, which almost by definition implies a universal concept of family, which, in turn, is a preposterous idea. It also implies that any form of group-based care is inappropriate, a last resort, or somehow harmful, notwithstanding that the research on this is anything but clear. In fact, such universal declarations about the preference for family-based care have not only condemned many young people to live in highly precarious and often abusive family-based situations, but they have also weakened our systems of care such that meaningful ways of providing care for children and youth that are responsive to social, political, and economic contexts are being neglected and de-funded. But we can also see this universalizing rhetoric embedded in trauma discourse, and in the ways we approach assessment, and in the context of strategies for participation, inclusion, and even rights.
The privatization of care – I have referenced this issue repeatedly in recent months and it is becoming increasingly clear that we are entrusting private entities, with private and often highly ideologized agendas, to take over the care systems for children and youth. We do this often in the name of efficiency and nimbleness, citing the failures of public systems to respond to the needs of children and youth. I am deeply concerned about this approach, which threatens to commodify children and youth in the order of their vulnerability; the more vulnerable, the more commodified. This issue brings my complaints full circle; orphanage tourism is of course both a symptom and an outcome of this privatization of care. For most of history and in most cultures, childhood was never a private good; it was, at the very least, a community good in which all members of the community shared responsibilities. Our complacency to the current privatization movement of just about everything, from foster care to group care and from therapeutic interventions to case management, will not serve anyone particularly well, but it will reinforce the longstanding disadvantages experienced especially by those groups who have been prevented from voicing their concerns for decades and centuries.
I know it is not considered very meaningful to offer complaints or speak to problems without offering solutions. Then again, I also know that this relationship between complaining and solving one’s own complaints is actually a way of disenfranchising many necessary critiques, and of creating the necessary space for agenda-laced, generally oppressive, and always exclusive ‘truths’ to make their way toward recognition as scientific knowledge. We have seen what happens when one form of knowledge becomes hegemonic – nothing good. I am offering my complaints as a way of starting conversations. From conversations emerge much more nuanced, much more inclusive ways of thinking about pathways forward. It’s not a very efficient approach, and I think that is good thing.
