CHRISTMAS IN CARE.....CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Community in the main, it seems, have a loaded, idealistic sentimental idea of  Christmas with children and young people in care .A somewhat soppy image of a heart warming, soul satisfying moment of goodwill and sharing with less fortunate children. 

It could be so, but child and youth care workers sometimes experience Christmas from a somewhat different reality. There are good times and bad times. It's not all tinsel and glitter.

Non-governmental facilities,....the "Children's Homes" more especially, are coupled in the community mind with poor, orphans, abandoned, neglected, abused little children. In general, as we in child and youth care all know, is not entirely necessarily the reality. Anyway, the idea of the "poor little children" coloured by media sentiment at Christmas, triggers a wave of well intentioned giving to these "less fortunate". Some parents want to foster in their own children a mindset of giving. They help their children clear out the cupboards of old, outgrown toys and clothing and deliver them to the Children's Home,  So, here we go. ...A constant door knocking. Arms full of cast-off toys, sweets, clothes, expired date luxury food-stuff. Cast-off cupboard cleared goods for cast-off children. Shame ! I called them the "do gooders"
It is all well intentioned, but on the receiving end of all this, the messages can, for the children, build, if not re-enforce pervasive mind-sets, a world view, which may NOT in the longer term be that healthy into adulthood. 

We even have jargon for some of these world views. "learnt dependence", "second hand citizenship", "P.L.O.M. (poor little old me!".  In more extensive wording, "the world did this to me. The world put me here, SO the world owes me. It's now my RIGHT to be provided for".

.....a child and young person expectation of benefaction.  This is an experience vastly different from child and youth care goals of reclaiming restoratively the lives of children and young people through the provision of healthy life experiences in belonging, mastery, independence and generosity as say, in the Circle of Courage model. There is a disconnection in all of this Christmas thing with our concepts of ecological care. We are sometimes ourselves as child and youth care workers, and as facilities guilty of creating an experience of extravagance at Christmas that approximates, if not mirrors a middle class cultural lifestyle incongruent with the realities following the child's disengagement from the facility. 

My worst experience ever of all of this was a seasonal  extravaganza staged by the "Motorbike Boys" in Johannesburg and labelled "The Toy Run". It was me. I agreed to host it !! About 250 to 300 motorbikes with pillion  riders arrived and parked on the soccer fields with two mountains of toys. One mountain for boys. One mountain for girls. Mostly wrapped, they ranged from bicycles to teddy bears. I had invited other NGO Children's Homes. Then the big hand-out started and so did the ruction. Accusations abounded. Children had joined the queue more than once. They just went round and round it was said . Boys joined the girls queue and visa versa, held out their hands for toys as they had sisters, cousins family and others. The motorbike boys said that this was not the intention. But of course they did. The children saw these huge piles of toys and it is part of our culture that we share as much as we can with family and others. It is part of our community spirit. BAD VIBES !!! And I bore the brunt of it. "Never again,"they said,"Not here".

Christmas impacts further on the end of year realities as children and young people will in fact be "released" into their own ecologies. .....Boy aged 18  comes into my office, "I think I'll just "park off here" for longer". Girl. "My little brother can go home but, I'm staying. I have and will have a much better life here".

All this Christmas stuff happens for the most part, well before the actual Christmas day. The school holidays start well before and the system of "holiday placements "click in. Some with hosts, some with mentors, some with significant others, friends and some with family...parental homes. Family gatherings in many of these family situations is often not that congenial. Alcohol consumption can frequently be considerable. Old family tensions and ill feeling can be re-awakened with disastrous effects for the children. Statistics show that suicide, suicide threats and attempts escalate.  As does violence. Frequently, children and young people experience, in this so called season of "good will'', a re-enactment of the very  situations which brought them into the system in the first place. Over Christmas especially, we had what I called, "the many happy returns" These included the necessity of "call outs", Calls to collect children . Calls by children, Calls by community......even on Christmas Day.

Christmas day, then, left child and youth care workers on duty, with the unplaced, unplaceable, returned, disconnected children These are all too often the most troubled youngsters with the most troubling behaviours

Shift systems determine who is "On" and who"Off" on Christmas day. It means that some child and youth care workers are separated  from their own children and families on the day of Christmas ( or Christmas Eve) 

It really takes a very special kind of person. A very special kind of dedication and commitment in the working life of a child and youth care worker to live through a working Christmas day. It's a sacrifice. It's a  applaudable service. It is seldom recognised in the same way are are police, the fire department, paramedics, nurses and doctors.

Child and youth care workers are unsung HEROES. 
               

INDIGENOUS PRACTICE.....CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

There's a sudden recent spurt of comment, question ,articles and discussion on the issue of indigenous child and youth care in South Africa. Or should I say,....lack of it? The form of response varies from academic treatise to opinion. Some of the child and youth care worker's voices for indigenous practice sound somewhat like calls in the wilderness.

It's not at all new...but an interesting renewal of the call to move away from the dominant Euro-centric, North American  theories and practice. And it is so. Our South African practice is Euro- technocratic rather than culturally African.

Blame gets bandied about. Blame the early missionaries. Blame colonialism.  Blame the churches. Blame academics. Blame the continuous importing  of  overseas key-note speakers to our conferences. Blame our Westminster form of parliament. There can be no doubt that the scarcity....No!.. lack of South African literature and research exacerbates our European, Canadian and North American practice. And it doesn't always work. This IS Africa. We ARE African..and so are the children and young persons in our system.

It all sounds as if we are afraid to apply, in practice, what we know.  Are we trapped in organisational cultures that want to look good in a child and youth care world for fear of ridicule or being labelled as unscientific and merely superstitious? No-one is sying that proven theory is  worthless in Africa. There is just a call to apply it in the unique ways of Africa. 

Our experience may provide a candle-flame glimpse of our distance or proximity to real, indigenous African child and youth care work here.

I say this often.  I always thought that residential care in child and youth care facilities ( Centres, or Treatment Centres ) , the methods approach, and practice was the sort of Grand Prix of child and youth care work.  BUT, when experiencing community based care first hand, my opinion changed. I now think that residential facilities can learn from community based child and youth care.  In the Isibindi project in Bethanie village in the North West Province, when the community or a family experienced a problem, especially with its young people, they called the police. The police were really good. They sat with the family or neighbours and tried to get everyone reconciled.They used a restorative justice approach. If that didn't work, they assisted to arrange a restorative justice meeting with and at, the tribal authority, I'm told in Setwana it is called rerabolola kgetse. If the chief or the queen was not available, elders in the Tribal Committee would facilitate restorative discussion. The basis of this is "It takes a village to raise a child" within the African cultural roots of u'buntu. Some say u'buntu is dead. But I experienced it in Bethanie.

Strange that we don't see it happening in the residential facilities that much.

In 1995, when the transformation of the South African Child and Youth Care system policy was published 17 principles of practice were listed. I was told that the then President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, added that last 17th.....African Renaissance. It was his thrust - we had to ride above the dominant culture and practice who we were.......African in heart mind and soul. So, in the Cabinet Enquiry of 1995/6  child and youth care Centres practice was measured also against African Renaissance. In general, there were somewhat weak, superficial responses. Food, celebration of heritage day, consent to circumcision if requested....and that was problematic for some.....Nothing central. Nothing spiritual.

Again, I go back to this frequently,  ..."Thom Garfat's " an intervention is only as effective as it is experienced to be effective." When Prof Norman Powell, a black American, said, " Young people learn to play the system", this resonated with me. In the gap between what we actually do in the Euro-centric system and the African reality, young people "play the game". It pays.

We constantly engage within ourselves and with young people in the search for meaning. What do we, and young people believe are the "roots" ....the CAUSE of their NOW situation? Probing around,  through engagement and trust building, we can sometimes pierce the game playing. Allowed in, for a moment, "I am being used by the ancestors as a message to my parents. Through what has  happened to me, they were meant to realise, that the ancestors are not happy." Rites and rituals either not done, or not properly performed. Some slaughter not done. Names not properly chosen. Catching these little moments of African meaning were much easier in the community based setting. 

Divination it was believed would confirm much of this
.
At the tribal place, the rerabolola kgetse, tribal elders and community could well also perhaps set out reconciliatory acts or rites to make good. 

I did say that this would be no more than an experiential candle flame glimpse to help us see if we are distanced from or approaching indigenous child and youth care in the African context.

Are we ready in our facilities to engage with white chickens, circles of elders, grave sites, beads, cords, herbs and goats sheep and divination. Maybe we are and do, but the cries for indigenisation suggest that we have a journey still to go.

It looks as if we will not get it right until we think Africa, problem solve Africa, Find African meaning. Break the African silence, Act Africa. Be proudly African.


  


  

SEXUAL ACTS CHILD ON CHILD........CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

The theme for this week's blog arose from a query on Social Media calling for names suitable to use when referring to children involved in sexual "abuse , child on child. Names that are not labeling, stigmatising or harmful. This is not an attempt to answer that question. It is to talk child on child sexual activity from a child and youth care perspective.

The website blog called "Defending Innocence" quotes statistics from "Darkness into Light", Finkelfor, Stallok, Broman, Fields et al. They say more than half (55%) of 501 adults interviewed said that they had sexual experiences before the age of 15 years. One third of all penetrative sexual incidents in the USA are between children under the age of 18 with a peak at ages 12-14. They do admit to a caution...an orange light . They say that "hysterical warnings"by parents, caregivers,teachers and guardians against "no go" experiences can lead some children to misinterpreting "hands off", "no sexual objective in mind" experiences as intentional violation and so .....allegations. 

Only yesterday UNICEF put out on Facebook that over 50% of all reported cases of sexual abuse in South Africa involve children. The statistics for child on child incidents was not given.

Other sources confirm what I think child and youth care workers know. Over 50% of so called "offenders" have themselves been sexually violated. There is a very high incidence of "victims"becoming "offenders". The more vulnerable children being the intellectually challenged, those with low self esteem, the disconnected, the previously hurt and those willing to please.

Many messages for child and youth care workers in all of this..... The very nature of many children in our residential facilities fit the profile of both the vulnerable child and the initiator. There were certainly some children in the group residential care facilities I directed who exuded a kind of victim attraction. I called it "the perpetual victim syndrome"  It's like  "once a victim always a victim". The "cruisers", always on the lookout, are very quick to pick up the signals.

Then we have, as child and youth care workers, to to differentiate between normal sexual play and experimentation verses intentional violation....we called it "sexual hurt"

Our South African Criminal Law ( Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment ct. Amendment Act No.5 of 2015 sets out important distinctions..its intentions are, and I quote:

"So as to ensure that children of certain ages are not held criminally liable for engaging in consensual sexual acts with each other

to give presiding officers a discretion in order to decide in individual cases, whether the particulars of children should be included in the National Register for Sex Offenders or not. ( my italics).

no criminalisation of consensual sex between adolescents". 

What it does, bottom line, is to remove the possibility of Statutory Rape charges against children for consensual penetrative sex, if the age of the child is 12 or above providing that the age difference between one and the other is no more than two years.

KEY WORDS; penetration, criminalisation, consensual, age difference.

As child and youth care workers, what do we encounter apart from normal sex play experimentation and adolescent dating? I must say that it is tempting to describe actual, individual incidents, but that is ethically problematic in a blog. So, in general terms:
Sexual Games: There was a story on Facebook recently of a gang related game in which older children would play a game called "treintjie" (little train) Anal penetration of young boys was part of the game after watching porn.. (or not watching porn). This game is neither new, nor is it only related to Cape Flats gangs. I encountered this one when giving consultancy a few years back in a residential facility. It was even then called "treintjie".
Initiation: all manner of sexually unacceptable and inappropriate activity can occur as a compulsory . "We all went through this. It was done to me. Now its my turn". Especially young new admissions. Anything from beer bottles pushed into the anus to genitalia being fondled and aroused with a feather duster.
Mutual Masturbation: This one was a shock for me when I learnt that the boys had a sexual activity they called "circle jerks". They would sit or stand in a circle, cross arms and masturbate each other until ejaculation. In one form or another mutual masturbation happens between boys and girls. Girls also experiment with grinding.
Transactional sex: consensual, but with a possible tacit or open agreement that there will be ongoing benefit to one of the parties. Can include the wives in gangs.
Now a list with no comment: Deliberate seduction, inappropriate exposure to sexual activity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, rape allegations following consensual sex, and then again, actual rape with or without force or violence. 

As child and youth care workers in group residential care settings it is a given that we WILL encounter it. There is probably nothing that compares with sexual incidents to trigger, shock, morally outrage, reaction and sometimes even child rejection and disgust in child and youth care workers. Thing is.... if we know that we will encounter it, that it WILL happen, then we can plan professional management responses for it. Interventive planning is done at three levels. The preventative level, the moment of crisis and the post incident level.  Planning is done at an organisationally as a full multi-disciplinary team.....  and this of course will always also involve the young people and the children. We all have to know what to do and what to expect. Some of the broad principle issues and then some of the specific issues warrant talk   

Consideration has to be given to the two PRIMARY underlying issues in sexual violatory activity......   POWER And SECRECY. What this , I think means, is that as professional child and youth care workers, and as organisations we have to guard against using anything in our response which validates,or replicates the the use of power and endorses silence.

Then we have to engage with the issues of....and this is again but a list: the use of technology like video, movement detectors, microphones to central security systems. (privacy versus safety), varying levels of supervision ( has staffing implications), Mixed sex cottages (can mean the separation of siblings), confidentiality versus secrecy, the involvement of parents, the role of the trusted person ( the person chosen by the child as the one to whom to break the silence).

If, as a child and youth care worker, you are the trusted person, or the primary worker, or one or the other is your focus child.....and I hope you are using the "focus child" approach, THEN you are a key professional in all of this. Of course there are other professionals involved in an integrated professional team approach, but these children are still in the life-space and at every level the child and youth care worker is a KEY, CORE role player. 

OH WOW!!! By the by... I favour "initiator"and "survivor" as a way of naming children in acts of violation. 



    

HIGH STAFF TURNOVER .....CHILD AND YOUTH CARE WORK IN SOUTH AFRICA

This is a response to a question posed on Messenger this week. "Mr B, I know that you directed quite a number of Child and Youth Care Centres. I would like to find out from you....what are the main challenges that have caused a high staff turnover in your tenure and how did you you address those challenges with your staff?"

The first response to this is to say that staff turnover was different from one facility to the next and that the differences tell a story in themselves. 

In 1983 when I first directed a residential facility, the then National Director of the National Association of Child Care Workers             ( NAACCW) had researched the rate of staff turnover across South Africa. Brian Gannon's statistics put the AVERAGE stay of a child and youth care worker at two and a half years.The average stay of a Director was five years. For a child and youth care worker, this made a short stay about two weeks and a long stay about 5 years or longer. The story was always..If you can make the first three weeks you can make the first three months. If you can make the first three months, you can make three years. Those first three months were critical. Many left before.

I do not know of any current research. It would be very interesting to do this....especially in government residential facilities.

In those early dormitory styled facilities for boys and/or girls, staff turnover was much higher than in the cottage (village) styled settings. We all know. child and youth care workers were called "house mothers" and "house fathers". They lived in. It was a 24 hour day with meals from a central kitchen. They were given, perhaps, 2 days a week as "days off ". The living conditions, the setting and the hours with little cash emolument was, obviously, in itself, a formula for quick turnover. Those who stuck it out were those in need of the accommodation more than anything else.

Staff turnover, and so, staff retention was a major cause for concern for me as a Director. The issue was that the children and young persons experienced a stream of different faces. People with no training at all. Each new person went through, what I called, a "baptism of fire" ..serious testing times as the children and young persons sought to establish, "Will this one last?"  In fact the VERY FIRST question I faced on entry was. "OK, Mr Lodge, so you're here. When are you going to leave?"

The behaviour of the young persons was a shock to  starting out workers. Newcomers found out very rapidly that this is not what they thought it would be. One came in, put down her handbag on the girls floor (..handbag!...girl's floor!) to wake them up. Before the end of the day she picked up her handbag (luckily) and walked out. On passing my office..."It's a den of snakes up there!"  Period of stay....less than 24 hours.!!! In and out.

What am I saying? Expectations not met, motivation for entering child and youth care work not realised, lack of proper training, the extraordinary life style attached to the job, the troubling behaviour of children and young persons with troubles and trauma, the small monetary compensation. These were the challenges and causes of rapid staff turnover, I wonder if these may inherently still somehow be lingering in our systems.

Live out staff on predicable shifts, at that stage.. in-house training, meal allowances for use outside of routine meals with the children, lots of opportunities to talk, share, plan and contribute to policy....All this was needed to slow down the exodus.

Then came a new curved ball. It was when we started our first child and young person's forum. Once they learnt that it was safe to talk out about the treatment they experienced, the otherwise secreted punishments and rule of fear surfaced. Some clearly abusive. Staff  ( without being named by the children) recognising themselves exposed and confronted in the descriptive grievances, left fairly rapidly.They just walked out of the door never to come back. Nothing developmental in that. Problem was, they had to be replaced. Frequently leaving a vacancy for far too long.

Sometimes there were fairly young graduates with psychology or education majors who applied to work in the facility. They wanted to have the experience between their first degree and going on to Honours. They always however put out the message that they wanted to make child and youth care a career. But what they really wanted was to chalk up practical experience on their CV's to gain easier access into the advanced degree. They hardly ever stayed long. They saw themselves as having knowledge which elevated their status. This was no doubt true, but the longer serving, hard core, child and youth care workers without any training, persistently quoted their experience as the key to better practice. They quite frankly, frequently, undevelopmentally, made the working life of these "young upstarts"quite untenable. Teamwork broke down. Not able to "get on"with other members of the team was reason to quit.

Then came the introduction of daily logs, compulsory training, reports, incident reports and assessment checklists. All of this was regarded as "Not what I was employed for". ... and the young graduates were further distanced as they were comfortable with all the writing.  Attempts to sabotage innovation largely failed as child and youth care practice grew in professionality and slowly there was an exodus of the "old guard"....often to the dismay of the children and young persons. 

There were times when, obviously I was compelled to terminate employment. Not a frequent occurrence, eg Drunk on duty, bringing marijuana into the facility, stealing from donations.

In my second appointment many of the same challenges were there. but there were some very different elements at work. Different dynamics altogether. Staff were established, It was a male dominated environment, as if women should or could not work effectively with boys.  This was the 10 year or longer end of the statistical turnover range. And this brought about its own set of challenges....As a start, a much bigger resistance to change. Now, as the new boy on the block, I frequently became the reason to leave. It was a top-down army styled hierarchical system. It HAD to change.

The approach here was to shift the power from the top down system into a system that was as democratic as possible. EVERYTHING was discussed. Weekly staff meetings, committees for everything, forums for everyone, Also weekly staff training, weekly interpersonal supervision. It was an attempt to get "buy in", to own and to understand the need for change. Some left. Again more especially when the young persons were given the same SOCIAL RIGHTS as the staff, (The right to be heard and the right to make choices... among others) and again when they became part of the democratic process. All this coincided with the legal abolition of corporal punishment. Too much change !!!!

Staff left because of not fitting with the dynamics of the system, the philosophy and approach of child and youth care as against being a 'House Master" as in a boarding school. Also lack of career pathways. There was this thing... "Once a child and youth care worker, always a child and youth care worker." To mitigate some of this, a system of levels and grades tied to scopes of practice  was introduced with raised key performance areas on a scale of  competencies from 1 to 4 with salary increments ( even if small ) to go with them. It worked to slow down the tempo of staff turnover up to a point. The group who called me the "educated idiot" tended to move out.

I hired a younger group and I hired for intelligence. I needed people on the staff that had a greater capacity than I. The idea was that I could do my job....and that was to manage and to direct. The democratic approach sat more easily with these incumbents.

My last management function was a period of one year in a semi-rural village community-based model of care . The Isibindi Model. Back to hiring off the streets . This time with a contract to be learners in a training programme from the get go. Reasons for leaving this setting were....Not able to meet time frames for the assessments...so "giving up". Support groups for assessments helped. I had left before the State took over the programme, but from what I was told the turnover accelerated. Issues arose, I was told, in the shift from a democratic approach to a top-down approach and apparent negative attitudes toward child and youth care workers as being lesser social practitioners than others. It was explained to me as a shift to power based management styles.

Taking an overview now. It seems that management styles, approach, over-riding philosophies and organisational dynamics and staff dynamics play a a seminal role in the challenge of staff turnover. As child  and youth care workers, we have a particular way of doing things. "Nothing for ANYONE without them," "Nothing for us without us". Child and youth care workers have a deeply built in belief that as employees we should be managed in the same developmental democratic way we practice.

I hope this helps.