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Listen to thisThe major news in residential child care in Scotland over this past month has been the publication of a Systemic Review of Historical Abuse in Residential Schools and Children's Homes in Scotland covering the period 1950 to 1995. The Review came about as a result of petitions to the Scottish Parliament from former residents of residential institutions, leading the then First Minister to institute a Review headed up by an “independent expert”. The remit of the Review was misconceived from the outset. It was not envisaged that the reviewers would need to speak to anyone other than representatives of “survivors groups”. Thankfully the review team realized the difficulties inherent in this brief and did seek permission to interview others who had lived and worked in or around residential child care. They also acknowledge the risk of imposing 21st century perspectives on past practices. Nonetheless, it is hard to do other than conclude that the Review was instituted for political purposes to confirm pre-existing assumptions of widespread and systemic abuse in residential institutions.
In actual fact I don’t think the Review found this evidence. The team interviewed around 35 former residents of care homes, of which there were hundreds (and perhaps tens of thousands of residents) over the period in question. Many of the experiences recounted are indeed harrowing. However, much of what former residents say centres around the area of identity – of not being told who they were, and linked to this who their family or their people were. In light of what we now know about the importance of identity this practice of deliberately and at times ritually cutting children off from their pasts seems and indeed was incredibly cruel. However, it was not unique to residential care. The same professional orthodoxies permeated child care more generally; it is only in the past 20 years that the importance of birth families has gradually been acknowledged in adoption.
The chapter of the Review I have most difficulty with is the one that recounts the views of former residents. They are unremittingly negative – perhaps they couldn’t be otherwise given the remit. Admittedly I came to work in residential schools in the early 1980s, towards the end of the period covered by the review. Like most of us who have worked in residential care over any period of time I have engaged in a fair bit of soul-searching over the past number of years since the whole subject of abuse in care has been so prominent – did I contribute, knowingly or otherwise, to the abuse of children I worked with? Did I miss all of this abuse going on around me? Of course, we can all identify practices that might not be considered advisable or appropriate by today’s standards and given the numbers of children involved and the staffing ratios, individualized understandings and responses to children were inevitably subsumed beneath the needs of the group, but my abiding memories are of well-run environments that were generally happy places, staffed by individuals who genuinely had the best interests of children at heart and who listened to them. Anywhere I worked was also open to the outside world “we welcomed visitors at all times of the day and night. My perceptions of what care was like are generally confirmed when I meet former residents. I remember one in particular who I met a couple of years ago who told me his days in care had been the best of his life and he wished he could turn the clock back.
I also have a more personal connection to residential care. I knew that my grandfather had lived from around the age of 14 in the Catholic Working Boys Home in Edinburgh. I discovered within the past couple of years that the home was run by the De La Salle Brothers, who, quite coincidentally, I went on to work for. My granddad died around the time I was starting there so I had no chance to ask him what care had been like for him but he went on to get a trade, marry and generally live a normal enough life for a man of his generation. An aunt, too, was brought up in a home run by nuns. Her memories are mostly happy ones. The nuns made her wedding dress and gave her away at her wedding. This is not the picture of nuns that emerges from historical accounts of care. Yet it is perhaps a truer picture, one that is confirmed in this account of a former resident of care homes who remembers.
There was a nun, who was the head nun of our children's home who was very, very fair, and kind, but not in a “goody-goody” way – she was a just person, and she offered us protection. (In Cree and Davis, 2007:87)
The Systemic Review speaks of giving voice to those who were abused in care. If politicians and policy makers really want to listen to people’s voices they cannot legitimately silence the voices of those of us who worked in residential care and those who lived there and have very different experiences to those recounted in this Review.
Another difficulty I have with the Review and indeed most “official” accounts of historic abuse is the unqualified acceptance of any narrative of reported abuse, whether or not there is any evidence to support it. We live in a society obsessed with abuse and eager to hear and accept accounts of it – the more salacious it seems the better. Thus we have a publication “Kathy’s Story” (published as Don’t Ever Tell in the UK), which sets out all sorts of horrendous stories of being abused in care homes in Ireland, reaching the top of the bestseller lists. It now transpires they were just that “stories. Kathy was not even in the care homes she alleges to have been in and what she reports did not happen. She has been used and indeed abused by unscrupulous publishers and a public seeking an outlet for outrage and titillation. Reports like the Systemic Review and the publicity it inevitably attracts risks unearthing a host of vulnerable “Kathys” seeking to make sense of their pasts through assuming the personas and the experiences they read about in the mis-lit (miserable literature) that is so popular in this uncertain age.
Another possibility, not considered in “official” accounts of abuse is that of false allegations, concocted in an increasingly litigious climate to claim financial compensation or reward. This possibility is one that is all too familiar to workers in residential care. On the back of this report we can expect an upsurge in allegations against care staff.
None of this will make care a better place for children. Although the Review is careful to try to avoid this the result of it will be a further vilification of staff who work or worked in care. There seems to be a perception that those of us of a certain generation are spoiled goods, tainted with the standards and practices of an era that politicians and policy makers would like to put behind them. There is an illusion that there is a new breed of residential worker and manager out there, imbued with a commitment to children's rights and “best practice”. If they exist I’ve yet to come across them. And even if they do they’ll very soon be tomorrow’s abusers, as the soulless state of current state care is put under the microscope by future policy makers.
As for those whose experiences are recounted in this review, on the claim that their voices need to be heard, I wonder how much better off they will be for the public airing of these experiences. Will they really achieve catharsis or some mythical “closure”? I doubt it. I can’t help but think that this type of process is not for them at all but for the politicians and agenda setters in children's services, allowing them to wring their hands and show to a public increasingly disillusioned with politicians, how concerned they are.
A newspaper headline reporting the publication of the Systemic Review splashed “Scotland's Shame”. Elsewhere this week it was reported that increasing numbers of under-16-year-olds are locked up in adult prisons. Over a quarter of children live in poverty in a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase. This is Scotland's current shame and it will impact the life chances of future generations of adults every bit as much as the experiences of care might have done on previous generations.
