Being the projected sins of the community

One thing which gets straight up my nose is the press report on how bad Child and Youth Care services are “without regard for the poor shape in which the kids come to us in the first place.

I hardly remember a child or youth who had not been through the most damaging experiences in his or her family, and then through months (even years) of social service departments” attempts to try this and try that, before finally being wheeled into our program as a last resort “and testimony to the failed and often misguided interventions of all who had worked with the family before.

Then, when the kid runs away, sets fire to the building, lashes out at the new adults around or self-anaethetises on drugs, the cry in the media is “Child and youth care programs fail again!" The neighbourhood mounts a vociferous protest against the siting of any program within ten miles; state officials inspect our project to see that we are providing the right diet, floor space, room temperature; and everyone seems to expect that we have instantly transformed each youth in our program into a polite, compliant, hard-working and upstanding citizen.

I remember once reading some “research" which purported, rather self-righteously, to show that children and youth in care and treatment programs were significantly more disturbed and troublesome than “their cohorts who remained in their own homes." Ye gods! One might as well set out to prove that patients in hospitals are demonstrably more sick than their cohorts who remain in their own homes!

Let’s be honest: one of the major roles we often play for our local communities and cities is that of the scape-goats onto whom all of their own failings and pecadillos can be projected, thereby absolving them of all responsibility “past, present and future “for the troubled and unhappy kids of society.

I concede that we should be honest enough genuinely to believe that we have a reasonable chance of helping before we admit a youth on to our program; by the same token, society should be honest enough to admit that so far they haven’t succeeded very well in what they are now asking of us.