Mixed race children are known to have adverse care experiences and those of white and black Caribbean or African heritage are more likely to be in care than any other ethnic group. The UK Censuses from 2001 and 2011 revealed that the mixed ethnic group almost doubled during this period. Further, the 2011 Census shows almost 50 % of all mixed people are under the age of sixteen. The confusion over how to classify and place mixed children for fostering has been subject to intense academic and practitioner debate in relation to ethnic matching and same race placements. Children looked after are primarily living in foster placements, but the carer shortage impacts on the types of placements and quality of care available. Notions of identity, culture, ethnicity, and race are all played out in the politicized site of Childrenās Social Care. Within the local authority where the research for this book took place, the guidelines surrounding matching suggest that children ādo not stand out as visibly differentā to the foster family. However, this undermines the social legitimacy of mixed families for whom visible difference is ordinary. Mixedness is understood as a problematic identification and has been theorized within the dominant psychologizing notions of identity without attention to the wider social processes of race-making. This book aims to examine structural inequalities in decision-making by exploring how mixed race childrenās everyday lives become underpinned by racialization practices in Childrenās Social Care.
The narratives of children and young people currently experiencing foster care offer rich and insightful knowledge about how they make meaning of their lives. Using a form of participatory research, photographs and images supplied from the family album underpin and enhance the narratives, and each case study is presented as a separate chapter ranging from care admission to care leaving. The two central questions underpinning the research are: How do children and young people derive meaning from the discursive repertoires of the mixed classification in their care experiences? In what ways are foster care experiences being structured through understandings of mixedness?
The four case studies in the book are organized around a fairly typical care trajectory. Firstly, care admission during which race, culture, and ethnic belonging underpin appropriate placements. Secondly, long-term foster care, when decisions about permanence can be hampered by same race matching guidelines. Thirdly, short-term foster care, when belonging within distinct racial, ethnic, and cultural categories can lead to transience and instability. Finally, a discussion of how the circumstances upon leaving the care support system or entering semi-independent living demonstrate that mixed race as a social location (when linked to gender, sexuality, age, and geographical location) can lead to increased sexual exploitation and vulnerability for female care leavers.
The material is theoretically informed and policy relevant and makes a contribution to sociological and practitioner knowledge regarding mixedness as a classification and category used to organize lives. It pays attention to ongoing debates concerning mixed as both an ethnic and racial category and the development of this category for official population counts.
The content of the book introduces a number of key concerns in relation to how mixed race families are understood in Childrenās Social Care through a sociological analysis of race, class, gender, geographical location, and sexuality. It explores mixed as a classification with ambiguous and uncertain ethnic, cultural, and racial boundaries, which leads to inconsistent decision-making among practitioners.
Chapter Outlines
Chapter 2, āFostering Mixed Race Childrenā, explores the image and function of care from its philanthropic beginnings to the state-controlled bureaucracy administering foster care that is prevalent today. Care is a transclass and transrace institution, and mixed race children are caught up in ongoing debates over appropriate ethnic and racial socialization, yet care matching guidelines do not specifically consider their mixed heritage. Subsequently, confusion is a characteristic of practitioner decision-making and mixed childrenās care experiences are underpinned by inconsistent interpretation of guidelines.
Chapter 3, āConceptualization and Categorization of Mixednessā,examines mixedness as an ethnic group in England and Wales with attention to US influences. By examining existing data and research on adverse care experiences it demonstrates that mixedness is a disadvantage at all stages of care assessment and intervention. Understanding practitioner assumptions about mixed families and the intersection of class, gender, sexuality, and race is an important factor in mitigating high care admission rates of mixed children. The language and terminology to describe mixed people remains contestable and do not easily lead to constructing a sense of belonging across racial or ethnic boundaries. However, commonality of lived experience is possible within this internally diverse ethnic and racial group.
Chapter 4, āResearching Mixedness as a Category of Experienceā,outlines the theoretical implications of researching mixedness and the racialization practices within research and Childrenās Social Care. It pays methodological attention to developing participation and working with vulnerable young people, and acknowledges the role of emotional research and emotions in research. The data collection began as a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The use of everyday experience and narrative leads to qualitative data, which is often beyond the themes of the research agenda and opens up new areas of sociological enquiry.
Chapter 5, āThe First Year in Care and the Matrix of Classificationsā, is the first case study and examines care admission through the narrative of the only boy in the projectāStealth. Dealing with the loss of his family life, Stealthās first year in care outlines how same race matching does not always mean ethnic sameness. His mixed classification is outside of the fifty/fifty binary with which mixedness is commonly understood, and his negotiation of securing a legitimate label and identification shifts according to space and time. The collapse of race, culture, and ethnicity is made apparent during his first year in care and he questions his belonging to his foster family. There is a discussion of how the construction of childhoods in foster care are far from ordinary and present Stealth with bureaucratic limitations on his everyday experience of childhood.
Chapter 6, āFamily Ties Through the Lensā, examines the narratives of Jasmine and Tallulah, sisters who have been in long-term foster care for nine years. Through their family album they delve into memory, loyalty, and belonging and show the different ways they understand their care experiences. It examines how widespread assumptions about inter racial relationships influence the decisions made by social care, consequently inhibiting the siblings stability for long term care with a white foster care. This chapter explores assumptions surrounding the role of white mothering of mixed race children and suggests this may continue to be a factor in both high rates of care admission and long-term stability with white foster carers.
Chapter 7, āA Portrait of Transience Through Careā, follows Amma as she uses photography to explore her past and revisit people and places. Her care journey is one of transience and she has been in almost twenty varied placements during her six years in care. She finds belonging through notions of diaspora and links to familial identities and ethnic heritages, speaking through discourses of class and location. The matching processes to place her result in separation from her three siblings and movement through a range of ethnic, racial, and cultural placements where she becomes chameleon-like in her adaptation to her new environments.
Chapter 8, āThe Leaving Care Transitionā, introduces Lucy as she leaves care with her baby daughter. Her narrative construction enables an understanding of how she performs her mixednessāas she is subject to misrecognitionāand this slippage requires further anchoring through an ethnic performance to secure a contestable racial identification. The construction of mixedness, gender, and age makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in specific public spaces. However, she uses her sexual desirability in remarkable ways to secure greater social capital through her choice of dating partners and motherhood.
Chapter 9, āLearning from Mixed Race Children in Foster Careā, suggests childrenās views on the here and now have largely been ignored. Paying attention to how children understand racialization within foster care offers rich knowledge to improve service delivery and advance theorization of mixedness as a lived experience. It offers conclusions in relation to the importance of developing greater awareness of the pressures faced by mixed families and the development of services and support during early intervention. Tackling assumptions about mixed families is a crucial step towards mitigating consistently high rates of care admission and offering mixed families a socially legitimate space. Through acknowledgement that mixed families appear visibly different, Childrenās Social Care can prioritize the emotional and attachment needs of children. Matching processes for fostering need revision to account for cultural customs within the childās birth family by prioritizing their primary socialization rather than crude applications of ethnic and racial classification. The adverse care experiences and high rates of admission suggest that mixed race children of white and black Caribbean or African heritage need specific assessment to deliver services appropriate to need.
Childrenās Social Care is in the midst of an institutional crisis. Solutions are being sought to re-work the image and function of foster care where 75 % of all children looked after live. Often children remain vulnerable in birth families, as practitioners are reluctant to take them into care because of its institutional failingsācare is seen as a last resort. A revaluation of care is long overdue in order to re-cast it as a positive alternative for struggling families and a safe and suitable place for young people that works in their best interests. Gentleman confirms
The stateās inability to provide adequate care for some of the countryās neediest children is one of Britainās most acute social injustices ā¦ many things remain very wrong with the system: poorly trained workers in frontline positions, high staff turnover and a chronic shortage of foster parents, so that children are not carefully matched with suitable carers but placed wherever is available. (20/04/2009)
The statistical first release offers national and local data on outcomes for children looked after continuously for twelve months. The figures are based on those collected annually through the longitudinal children looked after return or SSDA903 completed by all local authorities in England. In 2016 the educational attainment of looked after children shows five or more GCSEās at A*-C is at 14%, an increase on 2015ās 12%. However, children in care are twice as likely to be permanently excluded from school as are all children. Sixty one per cent of children looked after have a special educational need compared to 15% of all children. They are three times more likely to have a primary need of social, emotional, and mental health and less likely to have speech and language problems (DfE, 2015).
Further data shows the numbers of children looked after is steadily increasing and up 5% from 2012 and at 70,440 of which 74% (51,850) live with foster carers.
Based on data collected for the first time in 2016 and released as experimental statistics (to be treated with caution) 10% of 17-year-old care leavers were recorded as being in custody, higher than for older care leavers where the figure was 3% for 18 year olds, and 4% for 19, 20, and 21 year olds. Forty per cent of care levers were not in education, employment, or training compared to 12% of all other young people. Interestingly, the increase was in the category for NEET due to illness or disability and NEET due to pregnancy or parenting (DfE, 2016).
Very little research is done with children currently in foster care and this book sets out to address this gap in knowledge. As C. Wright Mills suggested in The Sociological Imagination, ā[n]either the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding bothā (2000 [1959]: 3). The overwhelming critique of care among both professionals and young people to emerge from consultations and the government report by the House of Commons (McLeod 2008) suggests that care fails to deliver the kind of warmth, stability, security, or love that young people deserve and ought to expect. Channel 4 television documentary, Dispatches, conducted an undercover investigation into the Surrey Children and Families Social Work Department which demonstrated that young people between the ages of twelve and sixteen are le...
