Listen to thisWelcome to another year! We are transitioning into this one under the worst of circumstances, with the full knowledge that children and youth in many parts of the world are experiencing enormous violence and trauma. Worse than that, they are experiencing these things knowing that the world is watching and either intentionally or inadvertently supporting this. It will be a year of reckoning. Our collective morality has hit rock bottom, with genocide and war now firmly embedded as at least of debatable value, if not altogether acceptable. I don’t want to write about this in CYC Net columns, but I can’t write about anything else without at least acknowledging that as I write this and you read it, a few more kids were murdered by soldiers who are themselves youth. This gives a whole new meaning to child and youth work, doesn’t it?
Back to the child and youth care practice we are more comfortable with.
Over the course of the past few years, debates about the merits of group care have intensified almost everywhere. Although there continue to be defenders of this structure in the care system as one of several possibilities and opportunities for young people and their families, overwhelmingly the policy and regulatory context of care across most child welfare systems has ruled either firmly against group care, or has reinvented group care as a form of individualized care that is to unfold in physical proximity of multiple individualized care processes for children and youth sharing a single house or building. In fact, the distaste for group care has taken on such absurd dimensions that children and youth placed in group care settings have become subjected to processes and expectations that are completely outside of the norm for young people outside of formal care systems. Outside of these care systems, young people don’t have individualised care and treatment plans, individualized goals that are reviewed regularly and assessed against achievement criteria, and structured routines that are specially constructed to fit exactly who they are as individuals, targeting only their strengths, and avoiding at all costs inconvenience, discomfort, and vulnerability.
This level of individualization comes from good intentions. It is meant to recognize that every young person is an individual on their own, with their own characteristics, identities, and strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, it comes from the recognition that every young person has their own story, and the further development of that story must therefore be tailored to their context and their way of being in the world. All of this sounds great, and I would not want to argue against such recognition. The operationalization of this recognition, however, is achieving the exact opposite of what is intended. Here is why.
As Aristotle argued quite some time ago, we are, by nature, social animals. By this, he meant not merely that we seek out social interaction (in fact, not everyone does, and this would probably be an ableist construction of the phrase), but that our individuality exists only in a social context. In other words, we are individuals because we are social. Similar kinds of ideas are expressed in other cultures and epistemological traditions, including, for example, the African spirit of ubuntu, in which ‘I am because you are’ (please forgive the simplification of ubuntu here), or the Indigenous mantra ‘all our relations’ (with variations across the diversity of Indigenous nations and groups). The implication is that we cannot develop our individual sense of self separate from our sense of group, how we belong in group, and how group shapes our way of being in the world.
Individualization does not mean individualized pathways to development and growth. Individualization means growing within a group and developing simultaneously a sense of belonging and connection within group and a sense of autonomy as an individual contributor to the group.
Although in practice, group care across many jurisdictions, and notably in North America, has been a resolute failure and probably done a great deal of harm (especially to Black and Indigenous young people, but also to young people identifying as LGBTQ2S+ and/or as having disabilities), in theory, group care offers opportunities that are unique, transformative, and potentially healing in ways that other forms of care, including family-based forms of care, cannot offer. Group homes offer groups. They offer a social context, guided and carefully supported by child and youth care practitioners whose core training is about ‘all our relations’, in which young people can find autonomy in their connections to groups. This, I would argue, is not merely an important side-feature of group care, but it is in fact the ultimate life skill and the ingredient that enables young people to move with confidence across social contexts, which often are precarious, unstable, and transitional.
In order to benefit from the group care structure and social process, we have to move away from individualizing every young person’s care plan and actively and intentionally reducing the influence of the group. If that were the goal, then placement in group care is entirely inappropriate and can only be justified by economic criteria of offering service at scale (and no one wants to make that argument). Instead, we ought to center the group dynamic, both in its positive and its negative manifestations. Groups of young people placed in group care settings are often characterized by a great deal of negativity, including peer to peer violence, racism, gender normativity and associated bullying, as well as behavioural contagion factors. This is part of the reason why we have moved away from group-based work in group homes and instead embraced individualized care plans. The message to young people is ‘you are placed in a group home not to pay attention to the group, but to separate from the group and mind your own business, pursue your own goals, focus on your own set of familial and other connections’. It is an absurd message. No teenager wants to live with others in order to ignore them.
What we need instead is a focus on the group, and a direct engagement of the dynamics of the group in an effort of supporting the collective of young people to find ways of constructing a healing social environment. Our efforts ought not to focus on avoiding racist incidents by separating young people into their individualized lives (which is a hopeless undertaking from the start). Instead, we ought to work through with the group of young people how racism shapes their collective and their individual lives. Restorative practices can be helpful in this context, largely because they centre impact on the social context of everyone’s life over individualized pathologies of wrongdoing. None of this is particularly radical or new. There have been repeated efforts to develop evidence-based, group-centering approaches to group care, including, for example, Positive Peer Culture (PPR), restorative practices, and adventure-based therapy where group interdependence is at the centre of learning and growth. None of these, however, have succeeded in becoming the norm in group care, and none are supported beyond the walls of the group care setting. Social work, child welfare case management, clinical practices, and even trauma-informed practices continue to fragment groups and disallow the exploration of autonomy within social contexts for young people. The demand for individualization is quite total – it is made at the expense of the social, and even against the social.
Interestingly, the antidote to groups in group care has been articulated as ‘treatment’. Today, treatment approaches for young people placed in group care are laden with anti-social values, largely driven by the idea that successful treatment outcomes are those that allow any one young person to rise above the others around them. The message of treatment is that ‘your success is measured by the failure of others’ (this is literally the case as most treatment outcomes are measured using standardized instruments that compare individual scores to group score averages). ‘Don’t be like your peers in the group home’. ‘Be better’. ‘Ignore them and focus on yourself’.
These are strange messages to impart on young people, who will, without question, face the challenge of living in groups for many years to come once they leave the group home. Such groups will invariably be precarious and ever-changing, whether they are familial groups, kinship groups, or groups of strangers. From my perspective, training young people to work based on their strengths is not very useful when they will be confronted with the unpleasantries and undesirable features of future groups in their lives. Quite to the contrary, I think young people must learn to engage with groups to generate collective efforts from within the group to create healing environments. This will undoubtedly require living with and working on vulnerabilities and weakness. And it will undoubtedly require capacity to confront harm in ways most of us cannot, including the harms of explicit or nuanced racism that appears across most groups, or the harms of invalidation and dismissal.
Group homes are places that allow young people to explore different ways of being while being with others. They allow young people to benefit from what groups have to offer while at the same time learning to battle the harms emanating from groups. Group homes mirror the lives of young people post-care much more so than other settings, including family-based care settings that often are far more removed from the everyday reality young people are facing or will be facing soon enough. But for group homes to be useful and to generate the kinds of opportunities that are embedded in this structure, we must return to centering the group and we must abstain from the well-intended but short-sighted individualization hype we have been fanning for some time now.
