UNMASKING AGENDAS..CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

A faceboook type question.....
Are you old enough to remember THIS?

When South Africa hosted the World Rugby Cup in 1995,there was a move in Johannesburg to "clean up" the city of street children. Obviously to make a good impression on overseas visitors. The boys were "picked up", literally, in trucks and transported, forcibly removed to "farms". Farm work was said to be a form of therapeutic reclaiming. I can't think of a more obviously masked child and youth care agenda than this.  It didn't last. The boys found there way back into the streets and to the genuine reclaiming programmes of the street shelters. The boys saw through the masked agenda . They voted with their feet.

In a previous blog, I was critical of the South African government for initiating social service programmes that it could not, or does not sustain. "Dry seasons" for child and youth care workers, late and little pay, projects closed. irregular pay. Isibindi projects nationally was cited as an example.

In the first place, adopting projects like Isibindi could have a masked agenda. In the social media, child and youth care workers complained about the strong focus demand and complexity of State  Monitoring and Evaluation. (M&E) reports. Salaries had been known to have been withheld. The complaint was that daily, frequently essential practical professional interventive work with children on the ground suffered as a result. The problem with statistics is that targets, quantity, numbers, so many children in a project, so many visited, and so on, reflect nothing of the quality of service rendered to children and young people by the child and youth care workers. 
Then, Departments, Provinces and Ministers trot out figures. .......Looks good!  Ruling party, departments, Minister's profiles get a statistical boost.
Dr to patient, " Your x-ray shows that you have two broken ribs. But don't worry. We took it to Foto First, and they fixed it." 

In an apartheid South Africa, Prof Norman Powell, University of New York  a black American, defied sanctions to give a keynote address at a National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) Conference. He used an analogy of a cookie cutter and a pudding bowl. He told this story.
At an airport, awaiting his flight, he sat next to a Mexican youth. They got talking and before departure, Norman gave him his business card and forgot the incident. Some years later, he got a call from the boy. He had been placed in a Child and Youth Centre somewhere in the USA. He asked for help. "There is NOTHING in this place that in any way provides for me as a Mexican. I don't fit here. They don't recognise me as a Mexican."
NORMANS RESPONSE....." Play the game! Play the system. If you don't, you will never get out." The youth was in a cookie cutter setting. No pudding bowl in sight, and no plate of different shaped cookies.
That's it. Young persons very quickly learn, or have to learn, how to "work the system" "play the game" for survival in a cookie cutter setting of dominant language, Euro or North American middle class values, dominant religion, spirituality, diet, problem solving and leadership style. Could be an unconscious or maybe a conscious lifestyle agenda. It may even be a genuine belief that a particular cookie cutter culture is a lifestyle that serves young person's best interests. One hopes that a cookie cutter setting is not a deliberate masked agenda.

When, in the pre-democratic South Africa, I was Director of an Anglican ( Episcopalian), faith-based Home for boys, the number of admissions steadily decreased. I was told by the then apartheid ruled Department of Welfare in the Province that there was a resistance to placing boys. "They come in as one church, but go out as "Tutu se Kerk" (Tutu's Church). Apart from the then political agenda, there was some validity in the rationale. A religious denominational cookie cutter programme. There was a resident Anglican chaplain on the staff. The boys were required compulsorily to attend Anglican worship services in the beautiful stone chapel in the complex. This had to stop.

Unfortunately it can be that proselytising is a masked agenda in a child and youth care facility or programme.

In the previous Children's Home as Director I inherited a history of children bussed every Sunday to a particular sect as church. The sect required that the children compulsorily spend two hours a day in bible reading and bible study. The sect requirement was that they read the whole bible in a year. (every year). Proselytising was actually a masked agenda there. The local press got hold of this and threatened exposure. Before I arrived, the principle of own church worship was in place. Cookie cutter became a pudding bowl. 

It's clear, proselytising agendas in child and youth care programmes  happen. Children in a residential facility are a "captured congregation". I have even heard it told to children, "If you don't convert,things will never get better for you."

I am in no way suggesting that all South African child and youth care agendas are masked in some way. On the contrary, we are known world-wide as dedicated, hardworking, and professional in our therapeutic practice . All I am saying is, be on guard, be sensitive, be aware, look out for possible underlying organisational motivation that falls outside of our professional and ethical focus.

Then ...masks off.