Absconders: Going and Coming

To growing lads, even a harem can be claustrophobic and in the end someone runs away from school. Frequently, it is a marginal lad, a new arrival, one less integrated into friendship networks or less bound by pastoral relationships with staff. Sometimes it is a fisted charismatic, dragging with him reluctant disciples. But whoever goes, the departure is news. Big news to boys in isolated communities where damp breakfast cornflakes can occupy boy and staff discussions for a whole morning. The likely lads' departure for the outside world is quite something. As boys run, the elaborate functional alternatives, the attractions constructed by the school to shield children from the pains of imprisonment, are swept away. For them all, the choice to stay or not to stay has become a conscious decision. For the lad making a coffee table for Christmas comes the attractive possibility, why not take your holiday now?

To be in an institution when the running starts is fascinating to an observer-participant and certainly merits much closer interactionist analysis than we can offer here. One can almost see the relationships between staff and boys changing, while similar shifts are manifest among the boys as well as within the staff world.

Staff scrutiny of boys increases, heads are repeatedly counted and there is a surreptitious locking of doors. Staff are abruptly summoned from class or workshop for furtive corridor whisperings, there are ringing telephones and hurried conferences behind closed doors. The deputy looks harrassed, the senior assistant breaks off from organising yet another mammoth change of Saturday work routine and even the head hurries back from his conference. Within the institution the excitement gathers and there is a busyness about the place.

To the delight of eagle-eyed boys, simmering divisions increase among the staff. The trade instructors, who have gruffly forecast the collapse of Mr Trend's therapeutic house for months, smile contentedly. Teachers, smugly professional and relieved of extraneous duties, hurry away at four, murmuring about the quality of residential workers. House staff cling to their offices with the wounded expressions of Renaissance Saint Sebastians, each 'phone call another arrow, while round the estate meanders the maintenance man, supporting a group of pathetic boys who cannot even find the gate. He has seen this many times before. At night, the night duty man, stirred to sudden industry, relentlessly plods.

The boys are perturbed, too, for while lipservice is paid by all to the dangers of absconding, they now see that the anxieties of staff clearly reflect their role obligations. The concern of top executives focuses on the outside world. “If you run, then run a long way and don’t do a job within a fifty mile radius of this place!” House staff are seen to be more concerned with the contaminating effect of absconding on other boys rather than weeping tears for the departed. Boys note that while caring staff seem violated by children's departures, authoritarian staff are affronted and organisational staff merely irritated. Instructors bemoan their disrupted work schedules and deviant staff seem actually gratified. “I don’t blame the lad. Thank God he has the guts to run away. In his place I would have gone myself.” To our newly arrived lad, the reactions of the other people to absconding must seem contradictory and largely unrelated to his needs.

Interestingly enough, the boys demonstrate this perspective. In questions designed to explore the ways they would sanction various institutional offences, we found that boys view absconding as susceptible to counselling and other normative devices rather than yielding to coercive or utilitarian sanctions. Indeed, the more unsuccessful schools strive to modify absconding by increasing organisational control, the more their boys reject it as ineffective.

But these are minor tremors compared with the epicentred disruption that absconding initiates in the boy world. As lads run, both the complex relationships and the elaborate pecking order built up in times of tranquility, disintegrate. When key figures in the leading crowd absent themselves, the boy world goes up for auction. The unofficial fruits that elite boys have culled from long and powerful residence go begging: coveted chairs before the television stand empty, beds beside warm radiators lie vacant, there is even more milk for the damp corn-flakes and a halcyon chance for the underprivileged to pour it out.

Established roles, nurtured over months, are gone before breakfast and high status positions go begging. For children, this is not only exciting but also well worth staying for. It is like Topkapi at the fall of the Sultan and provides an answer to one of the problems posed by both the interactionist and learning theories of absconding. It explains the riddle that a significant proportion of boys, who have been effectively labelled or carefully schooled as absconders, stop running. While the curve of numbers running away initially steepens in spates of absconding, it always flattens out. Many boys stay behind and some persistent absconders stay along with the rest. In spite of widespread staff fears that their school will empty, it never does; there is always a boy left to make the evening cocoa. In some ways, it is the institution's inward-looking topsy-turvy ways which finally save it. Many boys stay to enjoy those minor delights that are theirs for the asking outside. They stay because other boys have gone.

To staff, the exodus of the boys comes unheralded, as indeed does the lifting of the pestilence. But, to the boys, it is rarely a surprise. Indeed they help to set it off.

We always know when someone is going to bunk, you see them chatting in the tabholes or whispering in the dorms at night. So if you've got any sense you'll keep clear because the temptation to go is great. (Boy, 14, Community home)

Thus, there is a subtle and co-ordinated withdrawal of the orthodox from those to whom deviance is imputed. The lepers are forced to dance with each other and their untouchable role state is signalled.

Everyone starts to hang on to their gear, guard your best clothes and shoes, torches, anoraks, anything you've got, because it’s these they take. (Boy, 13, Community home)

You must look smart when you run, school gear is recognisable so when some boys are going over the wall, I put my trousers under the pillow and shoes in the bed. I even eat what food I’ve brought from the weekend, otherwise it’s gone. (Boy, 14, Community home)

Consequently, a munching silent host, wearing their boots and trousers in bed, wait for the freedom fighters to take off – a vision to warm the heart of an interactionist!

Many departures are calculated by those that go. Friendships are tested out, alliances made and broken, and the flight of a lone “nutter” can disrupt boys' well laid plans.

We even managed to get our weekend clothes out of lock-up and chatted up the lorry drivers at the motorway cafe, then that wet bastard, Jenkins, took off, he only hid in the school barn but it got everyone jumpy, so we jacked it in. (Boy, 15, Community home)

Naturally, it would be illuminating to chart the various rewards that come to absconders and the self-perceptives gathered on the run. The different receptions he will have when, and if, he reaches home can also be very significant. These interactions, as much as those of the staff, will contribute to the building up of an absconding identity. But, unfortunately space must restrict our concern to the institution.

Returning
Most prodigals return to their schools, but few fatted calves are killed and they have a cool welcome. The process of labelling accelerates. Those boys who return find a new informal structure among the other lads who remained and, in this, they must find a space. They also discover staff have revised their perspectives on them and usually not in a complementary direction. But the reception afforded to the returning absconder is largely influenced by the previous ideas that others have formed about him. Lads previously admired are usually received sympathetically by staff and others, while boys previously disliked have a chill reception. Indeed, a boy’s absconding is judged on return in the light of the routine deviance he previously established.

'Yes, well we are quite kind to those lads who are a laugh, but the kind who think they are God and are free with their fists, well, people are careful what they say to them. You don’t ask for trouble, but you don’t have them for mates.' (Boy, 14, Community home)

'They’re stroppy bastards when they come back and I always keep clear of them.' (Boy, 13, Community home)

'Oh yes, you can tell what the staff feel: some kind get a chat and a cup of tea when they come back, but others are just told to watch it. They can’t say much because they are paid to look after you, but you know what they feel.' (Boy, 15, Community home)

The return to the boy world is coloured by acrimony and reproach. Those who have stayed are blistered by endearments such as “grass, “arse lickers,” “time servers,” “gutless yellow bastards.” In turn, those who have run away are labelled by the law-abiding as “thick,” “pathetic,” “big heads” or “clueless” implying that the deviants are unable to see clearly the shining institutional truth that rewards come to the orthodox.

However, the bitterest reproaches are between paired friends or groups of mates, some of whom failed to share in the escaping enterprise. Here the acrimony is most bitter and the relationships rarely resumed. When the absconder comes back, he is more acceptable to those boys who have similarly returned or who view absconding in a favourable light. For some, informal status can only be maintained by going again when the signal is given. This clear reallocation of roles and accompanying self perceptions among the boys, added to the revised estimates of staff, illustrates the ways in which some boys” deviant roles are reinforced while, in others, deviant labels wither.

Certainly, return is very difficult for the absconder. His friendship patterns are shattered, his treasured roles usurped, his status dented and he has to endure a subtle chorus of reproach.

“So you’re back then, well, Johnson finished the coffee table – he made a good job of it, too.”

"Yes, we won the last match. Johnson scored, he’s such a reliable lad.”

"No, I haven’t seen your training shoes, they must have gone while you were away. Ask Johnson, he’s very helpful.”

Sitting on his new bed, furthest from the door and window, with a gash, looted locker and clasping a handful of summons for a myriad of absconding crimes ranging from stealing a milk bottle to travelling without paying one’s fare, the absconder must feel the label stick. Especially as, down below, house motherly teas and favoured expeditions grace the days of new converts and the orthodox boys who stayed behind.

For the persistent absconder, so labelled, a number of alternatives exist, of which continuing to abscond seems from the evidence to be far the most likely. He could, of course, adopt sackcloth and ashes and wait for the next crisis in order to return to the fold. But this is unlikely, largely because a cool analysis of the social situation is not a marked characteristic of these boys and the fold anyway is not that desirable. Many stay, some to be whimsically saved by the dynamics of the boy world just described, while others, brimming with resentment, expand their areas of deviance in the school, supplementing renewed criminality outside with a sullen hostility within. The self-fulfilling prophecy comes to fruition. Soon he is defined as irredeemable. There is a public washing of hands, and transfer – with all the labelling it implies – is inevitable.

This feature: Millham, S., Bullock, R., Hosie, K. and Frankenberg, R. (1977) Absconding: Part Two. Community Home School Gazette.