Residential Children's Homes and the Youth Justice System

Identity, Power and Perceptions

Julie Shaw

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137319609
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319616
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the factors at the individual, institutional and systemic levels which contribute to children's home residents coming to the attention of the youth justice system, and the consequent implications for policy and practice. Perspectives are drawn from both young people and professionals in the care and youth justice systems.

Part I

Setting the Scene

1

Developments and Experiences in Residential Care

A historical perspective

In common with the pathways and development of residential child care in different countries of the world (Courtney, Tolev and Gilligan, 2009), it is important to recognise that the nature of English provision and subsequent outcomes have invariably been influenced by a number of interconnected factors. These include: the socio-economic status of those who have required assistance and related ideas regarding the causes of poverty and the nature of the poor; theoretical developments and cultural norms concerning the best ways to parent children; scandals of abuse and the resultant enquiries and financial and political considerations. It will be seen throughout the book that such factors continue to exert a powerful influence on perceptions, policy and practice, and the consequent experiences of children and young people. This is particularly important to bear in mind when considering why residents of children’s homes might come to the attention of the youth justice system.

Frost, Mills and Stein (1999) provide a detailed historical account of the attempts of the state to regulate the perceived threat posed by the poor and the dispossessed, with specific provision for children and young people beginning to emerge by 1536. There was an emerging emphasis on child welfare, with the establishment in 1552 of charitable residential provision aimed specifically at children: the key aim of Christ’s Hospital was ensuring that children were educated and able to pursue a trade. According to Frost, Mills and Stein (1999, p.8), these developments represented, ‘an educative model which was designed to train and crucially rescue children from a future of vagrancy’. However, there was a ‘coercive back-up’ for this educative ideal, with those who attempted to run away being punished and deprived of their liberty. Indeed, the presence of a ‘coercive back-up’ has often been a feature of provision for children and young people in the position of being reliant upon the state or charitable provision:

What we have seen is the inherent tension between ‘care’ and ‘control’-an expressed wish to improve the condition of pauperised children and young people, which exists side by side with punishment, control and containment. (ibid., p.10)

As will become apparent throughout the book, the ‘care’ and ‘control’ dichotomy continues to exert a powerful influence upon the experiences of young people in residential children’s homes, arguably even more so in current times given that such provision is now generally reserved for those who are perceived to be the most challenging in the system.

When the Industrial Revolution brought about social and economic upheaval, with the rural poor migrating to urban centres, attention focused on the control of what were perceived to be the ‘dangerous classes’. This, in turn, had an impact upon the way that their children were perceived and responded to, producing a shift to more punitive attitudes. In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act led to a growth in the number of residential establishments, most of which were ‘multi-purpose’ workhouses where all paupers were housed together. Workhouses operated in accordance with the principle of ‘less eligibility’, which came about as part of a widespread concern over the able-bodied unemployed, who were often perceived as being the authors of their own misfortunes: lazy and unwilling to earn enough money to support themselves. As a result of this, it was considered that they should be encouraged to seek work and provide for themselves, by ensuring that workhouse conditions were such that only the desperate would seek its assistance, thus producing regimes which enforced harsh and petty rules and regulations. Smith describes how, ‘the Poor Laws thus embedded punitive and negative images of the poor, in which poverty was individualized and considered in isolation of the social context from which it stemmed’ (2009a, p.21).

While the official dominance of the ‘less eligibility’ principle ended in the early twentieth century, when, ‘a number of surveys and reports pointed to the widespread nature of poverty and suggested that the causes lay outside of individual failure and pathology’ (Frost, Mills and Stein, 1999, pp.18–19), it is apparent that in many respects such perceptions of the poor remain embedded in the public consciousness. This is evidenced by the very recent discourse regarding the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor surrounding the reform of welfare benefits being undertaken at the time of writing by the UK Coalition government and, indeed, Jackson (2006, p.11) highlights how:

Long after workhouses – at least under that name – had disappeared, the idea of ‘less eligibility’, that provision for children in care should never be better than they might of enjoyed in their family and class of origin, maintained a strong influence on the thinking of policy makers and administrators.

Residential children’s homes in England continue to be used almost exclusively for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and certainly, such attitudes were in evidence amongst some of the care system professionals in this research, when they expressed a concern that young people should not be given unrealistic expectations of the ‘reality’ of life after leaving care by the provision of too generous an allowance or too many expensive outings or holidays. Such ideas feed into an unhelpfully limited view of what young people in care can achieve and if unchallenged will continue to be a barrier to improved outcomes.

Nevertheless, ‘the aftermath of the Second World War and the acknowledgement of the disruption of family life caused by evacuation prompted social reformers to take stock of provision for children’ (Smith, 2009a, p.25). The death of a child, Dennis O’Neill, beaten and starved to death in 1945 in a foster home which was subject to only cursory inspection, coincided with this and further galvanised calls for reform. The Curtis Report of 1946 set out the basic form of the present English care system and the principles underlying it, including the ideal of bringing up each child in a way resembling as closely as possible ordinary family life. It was critical of large-scale institutional living and proposed that children and young people should be provided for in smaller units (of around 20 children) located nearer to centres of population. The report laid great emphasis on the need to treat each child/young person as an individual, in contrast to the institutional nature of most child care at the time and, ‘came down firmly in favour of foster care as preferable to children’s homes, urging local authorities to make a “vigorous effort” to extend the system’ (Jackson, 2006, p.13). Smith (2009a) highlights how the child guidance movement, drawing on Freudian psychology and emphasising the importance of working with children in the context of their family relationships, was a powerful influence on the thinking of the time. Nevertheless, children and young people continued to be accommodated primarily in institutional settings for a number of years.

The subsequent Children Act 1948 established local authority children’s departments as the first professional social work service for children and young people in the United Kingdom. The departments ran their own residential establishments and employed fostering and adoption officers to find families for orphaned, neglected and abused children and young people. Section 12(1) of the Act states that:

Where a child is in the care of a local authority it shall be the duty of that authority to exercise their powers with respect to him so as to further his best interests; and to afford him opportunity for the proper development of his character and abilities.

Here, there appears to be legislative acknowledgement that, in theory at least, the child in care is an individual with a distinct personality and needs, rather than belonging to a homogenous group which requires management and control. As later described, these sentiments have been reiterated and further enshrined in subsequent legislation and policy. However, as will be illustrated throughout this book, it is arguable that in many respects and for a number of reasons, local authorities still struggle to fulfil such aspirations, to the continuing detriment of young people, particularly in residential care.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Family Group Home became the favoured unit for the long term placement of children and young people, designed to reflect the ‘conventional’ family as far as possible. However, it could be argued that the primary development of this period was the challenge to the residential institution which came from the research of John Bowlby (1953). Bowlby’s highly influential theory of maternal deprivation suggested that disturbed or delinquent behaviour by children and young people was the result of the lack of consistent and adequate mothering during their early years. It was thus considered that the residential environment could not provide the attachment relationships that children need to thrive. Frost, Mills and Stein (1999, p.22) describe how, as well as being consistent with the official preference for fostering, which was favoured as being closer to a ‘normal’ upbringing, the research, ‘also coincided with the concern of the social democratic consensus to break with the Poor Law, which was symbolised by institutionalised forms of care’ (ibid., p.22). The official attitude towards residential provision was further reinforced by the findings of research undertaken by Goffman (1961), which was heavily critical of the impact of institutions upon their inmates. Alongside such developments, in the 1960s the emphasis moved towards maintaining children within their families wherever possible with the Children and Young Person’s Act 1963 giving local authorities the duty to provide assistance to families in order to keep children out of care.

It is also of note that ‘until the early 1970s the care population included many young offenders, who were placed in residential homes by the courts and typically remained there for two years’ (Berridge, Biehal and Henry, 2012, p.3). However, the Children and Young Person’s Act 1969 focused on alternatives to custody and led to a decline in the use of community homes with education for this purpose, a trend which was further reinforced by the Children Act 1989, which ended the use of care orders as a disposal for young offenders. Consequently, ‘a significant group of young people previously placed in residential homes as a result of their offending disappeared from the care system’ (ibid., p.3). It is undoubtedly the case that this use of residential care further reinforced the stigma attached to placement in a children’s home, a stigma which has continued to endure.

Nonetheless, Sinclair and Gibbs (1998) argue that the research basis which fuelled the disapproval of residential care was unsound, given that Goffman’s work was heavily influenced by a study of one psychiatric institution and Bowlby’s by the studies of a kind of orphanage which England no longer has. However, ‘the impact of this research was then to help to establish a clear hierarchy of child placement- adoption, fostering and, least desirable, residential care’ (Frost, Mills and Stein, 1999, p.22). Such attitudes later became further entrenched by a series of abuse scandals which came to light in the 1990s, and were investigated in a series of inquiries and reports (see for example Warner, 1992; Waterhouse, 2000). Concerns regarding cost have also played a part, particularly in connection with the doctrine of managerialism introduced to the public services in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher’s ‘New Right’ Conservatives, and its watchwords of ‘economy, efficiency and effectiveness’ (Smith, 2009a, p.7). In 2011 the weekly cost of care in a local authority children’s home was estimated at £2767 per week, compared with an average cost of £694 for foster care (DfE, 2012a), although Berridge, Biehal and Henry (2012) point out that the cost of specialist foster placements for young people with similar levels of need to those placed in children’s homes is likely to be considerably higher. Consequently, contemporary residential children’s homes are seen very much as residual provision for the most challenging children and young people, staffed by a largely unqualified workforce (Berridge, Biehal and Henry, 2012; Cliffe and Berridge, 1991). This is despite the fact that, ‘research findings do not indicate that alternative interventions are demonstrably superior’ (Berridge and Brodie, 1998, p.22) and that ‘for many young people ... good residential care is not a last resort, but rather a preferred and positive choice when their developmental challenges indicate the need for it’ (Anglin and Knorth, 2004, p.141).

Residential care today

In response to the ideological swing against interventionism, the number of children in care in England has fallen significantly over the past thirty years, from 92,000 in 1981 to 54, 000 in 1998 (House of Commons Health Select Committee, 1998; Fawcett, Featherstone and Goddard, 2004, p.76), to 68,110 in the year ending 31 March 2013 (DfE, 2013c). Children in England are now overwhelmingly placed in foster care, which has become more professionalised and currently accounts for 75 per cent of all care placements (DfE, 2013c). In common with Australia, the USA and Canada, the use of residential provision in England has declined substantially, accounting in 2013 for approximately 9 per cent of placements (DfE, 2013c – this statistic encompasses children’s homes, secure units and hostels), the proportion having decreased steadily from 32 per cent in 1978 (Berridge, Biehal and Henry, 2012). This is low by comparison with some other European Union countries: in Denmark, France and the Netherlands, there is a more equal balance of foster and residential care provision and in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, residential care is predominant (Kendrick, Steckley and McPheat, 2011).

Over the last 30 years there has been a decline in the in-house provision of residential care by local authorities; at the time of writing, 52 out of 152 local authorities do not operate any homes and ten do not have any children’s homes at all in their areas (DfE, 2013a). Almost half have closed at least one of their children’s homes since 2008. As local authorities have moved towards commissioning more placements from the independent sector, particularly from larger providers of children’s homes (Pemberton, 2011), the latest figures for England indicate that 1,718 children’s homes were registered with Ofsted on 31 March 2013 and that of these, 371 (22 per cent) were local authority run and 1,347 (78 per cent) were in the private or voluntary sector. To place such figures in context, this represents a 39 per cent reduction in local authority provision from 61 per cent in 2000 (DfE, 2013a).

Berridge, Biehal and Henry (2012, p.5) state that ‘it seems likely that this trend will continue, as at least 17 per cent of local authorities recently informed Community Care magazine that they plan to close at least one residential home or are reviewing their service’. This can result in young people being placed out of area away from family and friends, which while at times beneficial in safe-guarding terms and/or the provision of specialist services, may also include further disruption of schooling, difficulties regarding the provision of health care and the potential to cause distress at the loss of previously formed attachments resulting in concomitant behavioural difficulties. There is also the important question of whether private provision is able to meet the needs of such young people or whether, as has been the case in other sectors (Scourfield, 2007), income generation will be prioritised over quality of care.

Nevertheless, in what can be seen as something of a sea-change in terms of government rhetoric, recent pronouncements have seemingly reflected the growing body of research which has cast residential care in a more positive light (e.g. Sinclair and Gibbs, 1998; Emond, 2003; Anglin and Knorth, 2004; Berridge et al., 2008). The Care Matters White Paper (Department for Education and Skills, 2007, p.57) which was the precursor to the Children and Young Person’s Act 2008, acknowledged that residential care has an important role to play as part of a range of placement options, but again endorsed foster and kinship care (where children are placed with family members or unrelated people who are in the child’s social network), as the ideal for the majority, thereby retaining the status quo. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government elected in 2010, also agreed that residential care can make a significant contribution to good quality placement choice for young people, but in addition stated that, ‘local authorities should see residential care as a positive placement option to meet a child’s needs rather than as a last resort where fostering placements break down’ (House of Commons, 2011). After decades where theoretical, ideological and political objections to residential care have stymied its use, this appears to be a significant step forward in acknowledging the positive potential of such provision at government level. However, given the financial cost of this resource in comparison with mainstream foster care, it will remain to be seen whether the political will truly exists to support its emergence as anything other than a residual service. Indeed, in times of austerity such as those currently being experienced in the UK, it seems highly unlikely that local authorities already making cuts to services and endeavouring to balance more limited budgets, will be encouraged to reverse their decisions to close existing children’s homes or to place more young people in residential placements, whether operated by the public, private or voluntary sector. As a consequence of this, it is likely that the current state of affairs will endure.

The link between residential care and offending

When considering why young people in children’s homes might come to the attention of the youth justice system, it is first useful to consider what can be gleaned from existing research studies and other available data. A useful starting point is to consider the reasons individuals are taken into care and the implications that this might have for future behaviour. Children and young people can be voluntarily accommodated under section 20 of the 1989 Children Act. Here their parents continue to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Setting the Scene
• Part II  Research Findings
• Part III  Conclusion
• References
• Index