Constructing a global understanding of the social ecology ... - CiteSeerX

Children and Youth Services Review 33 (2011) 2412–2416

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Constructing a global understanding of the social ecology of leaving out of home care John Pinkerton Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e

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Available online 26 August 2011 Keywords: Youth transitions Out of home care Leaving care International child welfare Youth mentoring South Africa

a b s t r a c t Engagement with globalisation is growing in the field of youth transitions from out of home care. This includes cross national exchange of research, policy and practise, regional advocacy networking and global policy development. Furthering this emerging international child welfare perspective requires extending it to countries in the developing world and building conceptual frameworks which encompass a social ecology of care leaving, including its global dimension, the latter needs to address not only the needs, expectations and rights of care leavers but also the theories of change underpinning service design and delivery. Such a model is presented combining resilience and social capital as personal assets situated within a social ecology of support. To illustrate how this provides a means to help engage with the experience of countries where there appears to be very little information available on care leaving, a small scale South African initiative is considered. SA-YES is a youth mentoring project for young people leaving a variety of out of home placements. Planned as a three-year pilot, initial results are encouraging but require more rigorous evaluation focusing on program process and outcomes, quality of interpersonal relationships and synchronisation with cultural expectations and policy environment. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction A decade ago it was reasonable to argue that: “in the international child welfare literature leaving care has yet to be recognised as an area of shared global concern” (Pinkerton, 2002, p36). Today the field is rather different. There is much more sustained and widespread attention being given to developing international understanding and action on the needs of young people leaving out of home care. This includes exchanging research, policy and practise experience, cross national advocacy networking and global policy development. However there remain massive gaps in the international picture to have emerged so far. There appears to be no readily available material on leaving care in Africa, China, India and South America. Without knowing more about those regions any claim to there being a global perspective on care leaving cannot be taken seriously. There is a pressing need to find the means to gather the information and understanding that undoubtedly does exists in those and other regions and countries so far not engaged. Whilst it is self evidently the case that where ever there is out of home care there will be young people experiencing their transition from youth to adulthood as care leavers, identifying and documenting that experience are not easy tasks. From both national and cross national work to date it is clear that there are major challenges both in accessing source material systematically and in aggregating and analysing it (Pinkerton, 2006). However if those not already involved

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in constructing a global understanding of care leaving are to be engaged there is another question to be asked along with how can this work be done — why should it be done? Despite the apparently obvious response, globalisation, it is still worth considering a caution from almost twenty years ago. “It is increasingly acknowledged that developments in any single country cannot be explained without setting them in the context of wider – global – changes. Yet there is a danger that the new orthodoxy may make it rather easy to espouse a comparative approach without being quite clear why or what questions can be most helpfully illuminated through comparison” (Cochrane, 1993, p1). Without a clear response to that caution it is hard to justify the time and effort required to engage in internationalising the field of care leaving — especially in countries where there are only very limited resources available for doing any work in response to the needs of this very vulnerable group of young people. So the aim of this paper is to try and provide a tentative answer to the ‘why’ question based on the experience of being involved with national and cross national research and practise. It will be suggested that only through attention to the social ecology of care leaving, including its global dimension, can the needs of this group of young people be understood and appropriate services be developed. If that is the case then it follows that the questions that global exchange needs to illuminate concern the mechanisms of that social ecology. Using an illustration from South Africa, it will be suggested that engaging in the exploration of such questions could have benefits for even the most hard pressed organisation. It will also be suggested that such engagement would at the same time make a useful

J. Pinkerton / Children and Youth Services Review 33 (2011) 2412–2416

contribution to the global debate. Indeed it is hoped that this paper will make some contribution to finding ways of ensuring that experiences from the ‘global south’ (the countries of the world's poorest regions) become part of the collaboration needed to construct a truly global understanding of care leaving. 2. Uneven development In 2008 the International Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood from Care (INTRAC, established 2004), produced the first international text in this field. The book describes young people's transitions from state care in sixteen countries, mostly in Western Europe and North America but also in Jordan, Israel and Australia (Stein & Munro, 2008). The national chapters establish a useful generic framework for presenting available material on care leaving: socioeconomic context; type of welfare regime; key general child welfare statistics; legal mandate; existing research and information on care leaving plus illustrative case studies. General chapters discuss the importance for cross national exchange of not only considering primary research on care leaving but also secondary data and wider legal and policy frameworks along with the patterning of welfare regimes. The following year, 2009, SOS Children's Villages International launched their ‘I Matter’ campaign. This is based on a network of young people and their advocates in fifteen countries. It aims to ensure that young people growing up in out of home care in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are provided with appropriate preparation for leaving care and after care support (http://www.sos-childrensvillages. org/What-we-do/Child-Care/Quality-in-Care/Advocating-Quality-Care/ Pages/IMatter.aspx). It provides an inspirational model of rights based, young person led, evidence informed advocacy which other regions could follow. Also that year the Chinese Children's Home and Shelter Association (CCSA) organised a major conference and linked staff workshops in Taipei. The aim was to share best practise and policy from the UK with Taiwanese practitioners, managers and policy makers. Close attention was given to ensuring that the information and how it was shared were tailored to the particular needs of the different constituencies required to advance leaving care services within the national context of Taiwan — a strategic approach that other countries might find useful to adapt. Most importantly in 2009 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child produced a formal benchmarking of global expectations in regard to care leavers. This appeared as part of its Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (General Assembly of the United Nations 2009). This resulted from work started in Brazil five years earlier in response to international concern about the quality of care in children's homes. The need for planned and properly managed preparation for leaving and supported after care is clearly stated. So too is the importance of ensuring such work begins early in a care career and directly involves the young person in the process of planning and delivery. These examples serve as illustrations that in the last decade care leaving has been steadily emerging as an item on the international child welfare agenda. The question now is how to capitalise on this welcome development by ensuring that information and understanding are shared and developed in a way that actually improves the lived experience of young people leaving care wherever they live. This is no simple matter of knowledge transfer from those who have it to those who do not. The national mapping carried out by INTRAC (Stein & Munro, 2008) and by SOS Children's Villages International (Lerch & Stein, 2010) does seem to show that whilst significant numbers of care leavers may go on to flourishing lives, significantly more do not. They are ill equipped to cope with the transition from the care placements of their youth (and in many cases childhood) to the challenging demands of adulthood. It is also clear that there is wide variation across countries in policy and practise and in the amount

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and quality of information and research on care leaving — and that is only in the restricted number of countries and regions mapped to date. Even in countries, such as the US and the UK, where considerable attention has been given to improving care leaving through legislative reform, policy initiatives, specialist provision and focused research, there continues to be limited understanding of what works for which young people at particular points in care leaving. Documenting the needs of these young people and the programs available to them has tended to be descriptive rather than analytical or theoretical (Stein, 2006; Montgomery, Donkoh, & Underhill, 2006; National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the Social Care Institute for Excellence 2010). In every country there needs to be increased attention to making explicit and testing models for understanding the experiences of care leaving. These models have to address not only the needs, expectations and rights of young people making these transitions but also the theories of change underpinning service design and delivery. 3. Interlocking systems As greater attention has been paid to the experience and outcomes of leaving care, there has been increasing recognition given to “the complex interplay between ideology, research, law and practise” (Stein, 2004, p118). This calls for systemic modelling that can capture both the various dimensions of need (self and cultural identity, health and wellbeing, relationships and social support) and the key stages in the process of service delivery (pre-care, in care, leaving care, after care) (Pinkerton & McCrea, 1999). In a range of national contexts the strengths and vulnerability of young people transitioning from state care have been found to be woven into the various dimensions of their lives. Leaving care needs to be understood as about the ‘whole person’. Accordingly the goal of those charged with ensuring the welfare of care leavers must be to provide a similarly joined up ‘whole system’ response (Broad, 1999; Pinkerton, 2006). To provide a ‘whole person/whole system’ response it is helpful to think about youth transitions in general and leaving care in particular, not as the achievement of a set of completed outcomes for a phase in the life cycle, but as an ongoing developmental process of coping in acceptable and unacceptable ways with the changing physical, psychological and social circumstances of uneven and fragmented transitions. “Uneven, because different groups of young people have very different experiences of the transition to adulthood. Fragmented, because the different markers of adulthood are increasingly uncoupled from each other” (Thompson, Fylnn, Roche, & Tucker, 2004, p14). This experience is linked with chronological age but is more dependent on levels of formal and informal support, structures of opportunity and personal agency (Coleman & Hagell, 2007; Henderson, Holland, McGrellis, Sharpe, & Thomson, 2007; Pinkerton & Dolan, 2007) — precisely the assets that seem in such short supply within the care leaving population (Mullan, McAlister, Rollock, & Fitzsimons, 2007). “Young people enter the looked-after system with disadvantage but the system seems unable to address this issue and instead the young people seem to ‘accumulate disadvantage’ as they pass through the system to the process of leaving care” (Mills & Frost, 2007, p55). Success or failure to cope with care leaving in a fashion that is either or both personally and socially acceptable can usefully be thought of as depending on a young person's resilience (Stein, 2008) and social capital (Barn, 2009). Both these terms are contested and open to different interpretations even amongst those who find them useful (Leonard, 2005; Mohaupt, 2008). What makes them useful here is that they both capture a sense of combined ‘wellbeing’ and ‘well becoming’. Resilience has been defined as “the quality that enables some young people to find fulfilment in their lives despite their disadvantaged backgrounds, the problems of adversity they may have undergone or the pressure they may experience” (Stein,

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2008, p36). Social capital can be defined as “the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu & Wacquaint quoted Henderson et al., 2007, p12). These personal assets of resilience and social capital need to be situated within a social ecology of support. This can be captured figuratively in a very schematic logic model linking service interventions with coping through impact on the social ecology in which formal and informal, enriching or impoverishing, networks of support resource a young person's social capital and resilience (Fig. 1). The poor outcomes that research to date has identified as characteristic of care leaving in a range of countries can be considered to be the outworking of low resilience and limited social capital within an impoverished social ecology of support — the accumulated disadvantage of pre-care and in-care experience noted above. Perhaps more importantly the different levels of coping between young people within care leaving populations, which is now gaining research attention (Courtney, Hook, & Lee, 2010; Stein, 2008), can be seen as reflecting differences in the extent to which social capital and resilience have been garnered as developmental assets by care leavers from past and present engagement with their social ecology of support. A systemic perspective prompts this horizontal logic model at the level of a particular leaving and aftercare intervention and a particular young person. It also encourages vertical thinking about the nested nature of the social ecology of care leaving at the national and international levels. Any leaving or aftercare intervention will not only be part of the local level but will also be situated within organisational and policy systems that will in turn be part of interlocking national and international systems (Pinkerton, 2008). In many countries there will also be a number of administrative and political levels between the local and the national (such as states in the US and India). There are also regional structures between the national and the international (such as the European Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development) which may need to be taken into account. Leaving care policy and practise needs to be considered within the broader sweep of child welfare which itself lies within a larger social welfare political context (Collins & Pinkerton, 2008). That recognition brings with it the challenge of not only working with the “compressed and accelerated transitions” experienced by care leavers (Stein, 2004, p53), but also managing the ever shifting world of organisational structures, policy and legislation that is contemporary welfare provision (Daly, 2011). The quickening pace of change and its unsettling and uneven impact on both young people leaving care and those who work with them point to the influence of globalisation. The term has become something of a talisman for our times with its emphasis on interconnectedness along with insecurity, driven by new technologies, particularly in the field of information communications technology (ICT), and ever more porous social boundaries open to all sorts of cross

INTERNATIONAL Care Leaver’s Social Capital

NATIONAL

Leaving and Aftercare Intervention

COPING CAPACITY FOR YOUTH TRANSITION

LOCAL Social Ecology of Support

Care Leavers’s Resilience

Fig. 1. A globalised social ecology of care leaving.

national economic, cultural and political influences (Sassen, 2007; Yeates, 2001). In the late 1990s the United Nations Development Programme identified four structural changes that it anticipated would have impact on human institutions across the world into the new millennium: new global markets (e.g. deregulated financial services); new global actors (e.g. International Non Governmental Organisations); new rules and norms (e.g. human rights conventions); new modes of communications (e.g. the internet and mobile phones) (cited Payne & Askeland, 2008). Together these create a dynamic force for economic, political and cultural global change that brings with it not only opportunities for progressing global well being but also costs that undermine progress — economic, social and political instability associated with communities in conflict, natural and forced migration, child exploitation and the spread of disease (Lyons, Manion, & Carlsen, 2006). The costs and benefits of globalisation are not evenly distributed but follow and compound the social and geographical fault lines of local, national and international inequality. All the evidence to date suggests that young people leaving care are highly vulnerable to social exclusion and ill equipped to deal with the increasingly competitive youth labour and housing markets, the instability and complexity of social relations and the demands of constructing self identities influenced by an ICT hyper consumerism. Accordingly it seems reasonable to include in any theory of change concerning the lives of care leavers, the assumption that individual experiences are interlocked with processes and institutions sited not just at the local but also the national and international levels. The converse is also the case. “Studying the global … entails a focus not only on that which is explicitly global in scale but also on locally scaled practices and conditions that are articulated with global dynamics” (Sassen, 2007, p18). Indeed, as the cleverly titled article “Skateboarding behind the EU lorry” (Anghel & Beckett, 2007) about care leaving in Romania since its regime change in 1994 suggests, the lives of care leavers may be a rich source of revealing metaphors for the national and international systemic change experienced under conditions of globalisation. 4. Leaving out of home care in South Africa This globalised systemic perspective provides a means to approach the question of how to start engaging with countries such as those in Africa where there appears to be very little information available on care leaving. Taking South Africa as a case in point it needs first to be recognised that this is a social formation undergoing major changes in every sphere of life and all ‘articulated with global dynamics’: “life style, formal democracy and business activity of an advanced ‘first world’ country are meshed with the mass rural and urban poverty, social exclusion, and inadequate institutions and systems of democratic governance characteristic of the ‘third world’ (September & Pinkerton, 2008). The South African government in accord with its commitment to building an inclusive developmental state is struggling to chart, resource and implement a repositioning of social welfare as an alternative to the globally dominant traditions of institutional and residual welfare (Loffell, 2008; Patel, 2005; Patel, 2008). The aim is to find a way of promoting social and economic inclusion through enhanced personal functioning as part of an overarching public policy goal of social justice. As an approach to welfare practise this involves attempting to synthesise the AngloAmerican professional models used under apartheid with indigenous African experience. The latter includes both the collective responses that were developed to resist the neglect and assaults from the Apartheid state during the struggle years and ‘Ubuntu’, the traditional ethic of mutual support captured in the Zulu maxim ‘a person is a person through other persons’. The overwhelming scale of the challenge being grappled with in South Africa is all too clear in the field of child welfare. In 2007 around


40% of the population were children (18.3 million) of whom two thirds lived below the poverty line, nearly 7 million lived in households with no access to clean drinking water on site and 3.7 million were orphans, reflecting the savage impact of the AIDS pandemic (Pendlebury, Lake, & Smith, 2009, p71/2). It has been estimated that there are over 10,000 children in around 180 residential units registered by government as ‘children's homes, and this is likely to be a substantial underestimation. In addition there is an unknown number of children living in unregistered out of home settings (Meintjes, Moses, Berry, & Mampane, 2007). Even in regard to children in statutory care, it is “at present not possible to form even a very basic picture of the population .... and even less possible to gauge what is happening to these children” (Loffell, 2007, p298). However on the basis of anecdote, rudimentary information and exploratory research it is a reasonable assumption that this large and diverse sector contains both excellent and unacceptable practise and that some of that includes care leaving. Leaving care in South Africa has to be seen as part of an almost overwhelming situation of massive, extreme and basic structural child welfare need which clearly requires the intervention of national government and international agencies. To date this does not appear to have focused on care leaving — though that may change with the gradual impact of new child welfare legislation that came into force in 2010 (see Law Reform on http://www.ci.org.za) and the UNCRC Guidelines on Out of Home Care (General Assembly of the United Nations 2009). However, the human face of that need prompts all sorts of small scale responses; often within the neighbourhoods where the children in need come from but also further afield and indeed from outside the country (Meintjes et al., 2007). It may be that it is within these small scale responses that a starting point for dialogue can be found. One such small scale initiative is SA-YES (South African Youth Education for Sustainability), an independent nongovernmental organisation (NGO) founded in the UK in 2008. “I arrived in Cape Town knowing that I wanted to work with young people who were leaving care. I knew that there was a gap in the system and that there was a need. I neither understood that need nor did I know how to attempt to meet it. I was fortunate to meet some helpful people who spent time with me talking through different ideas. In particular I spent time with young people living in children's homes. They shared with me their stories and their hopes for their futures.” (http://sa-yes.com/home/). The initial plan was for SA-YES to set up a residential unit providing after care that could act as a half way house between care and independent living which was to be targeted at street children (the organisation was originally called OTSK — Off The Street Kids). This however was rejected out of concern to avoid adding a further period of institutional care into the lives of these young people. The search for an alternative to more residential care also came from a commitment to Ubuntu which chimed with the SA-YES ethic of personal empowerment through collective interdependence. Its web site carries a banner quote from the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Friere: “While no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others”. From that perspective it made sense to look for a means by which young people could find their way as adults through building positive relationships within their communities. Influenced by work known to be underway in the UK and the US it was decided to establish a mentoring project — Transition to Independent Living (TIL). Young people still in out of home care (mentees) are matched with trained volunteers (mentors). The mentors and mentees commit to meeting once a week for a full year to work together on an agreed leaving care agenda dealing with issues of housing, employment, education and training, personal development and support with family and community reintegration. The mentoring project has been planned to be a three-year pilot to run from January 2010 to December 2012. This will allow for three 12 month cycles of recruitment and selection of mentors and

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mentees, training for both groups, matching, support and supervision during the mentoring period and endings. The intention is to both improve and expand the numbers involved with each cycle — starting with 15 pairings and ending with 35. During the first year a lot appears to have been learnt through trial and error and constant review. Of the first 15 mentees 3 have places at university, 4 are going to college, 3 staying on at school and one is in full time work. The residential homes of 8 of the young people are continuing to provide accommodation, in another case there has been a move to a unit for young men and in 4 cases the young people have moved back to their own communities, in one case to family. The young people have been given the opportunity to continue with mentoring and 7 intend to do so. “As we develop the programme we are starting to see what success should look like … While success is very difficult to measure (particularly as we have no baseline data, due to lack of research) we are incredibly happy with the results from 2010” (http://sa-yes.com/home/).

5. Basis for dialogue As a pilot SA-YES has given attention to developing systems for documenting its progress but recognises that this does not yet provide sufficiently rigorous base line data to provide anything more than a fairly loose formative evaluation of its work to date. However in addition to the routine administrative recording, the project was the subject of a student dissertation during its first year (DiAddezio, 2010). Based on 14 semi-structured interviews with mentors, mentees, and the Executive Director/Co-founder of the organisation, it focused on how the programme was being shaped through its organisational structures, the ways in which mentoring was understood by SA-YES staff, by mentors and by mentees, and by how mentors and mentees in practise managed their relationship. The dissertation very perceptively focuses on the “constructions of mentorship” not only because SA-YES is in its start up phase but also because the core of mentoring is relationship and the construction of shared meaning. That construction is based on the rich communication, negotiation and accommodation between those who make up the mentoring learning community of SA-YES staff, key staff in the residential homes, the mentees and the mentors. The power dynamics around organisational structure, age and race were noted as being of particular importance. Based on its findings the dissertation makes four suggestions. The first is that each mentor–mentee pair should write up their own statement on what they understand their mentoring relationship to be, either replacing the standardised SA-YES mentor–mentee agreement or as an additional document. The second suggestion is that mentor and mentee training and supervision should directly address issues of race and culture and promote cross-cultural competency. The third is that the organisation's work needs to be located in a fuller understanding of South African child welfare policy in this area. Fourthly it is suggested that it would be helpful to study other rites of passage that mentees may experience and how they affect the mentor–mentee relationship. These issues and the wider experience of SA-YES if considered in relation to two recent literature reviews on mentoring and care leavers focused on the US (Spencer, Collins, Ward, & Smashnaya, 2010) and Australia (Mendes, 2009), are clearly variations on cross national themes — the selection and management of core features to the programme, the quality of interpersonal relationships, the synchronising with cultural expectations and the supportiveness of the policy environment. Making that connection also links the SA-YES experience with the very real concerns about mentoring as an intervention with care leavers — “the existing empirical literature on the conditions associated with effective formal youth mentoring relationships and the potential for harm in their absence should give us pause, as meeting these

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conditions may be especially challenging when working with transitioning youths” (Spencer et al., 2010, p 225). This is captured well by a focus on race: “the well known disproportionate representation of youths of colour within the child welfare system, coupled with the fact that most adult volunteer mentors in formal programs are white and reside in middle — to upper-income households suggests that attention to the role of race and culture in the mentoring process should be a priority” (Spencer et al., 2010). Race is a theme which could be used to flesh out and to test the components of a globalised logic model such as that suggested in Fig. 1 — including helping to clarify debate around what is meant by resilience and by social capital. The model provides a means by which the experience of mentoring schemes in different countries could be described, compared and contrasted. It encourages their description, firstly in programmatic terms as discrete leaving and aftercare interventions and then in terms of the formal and informal characteristics of the local social ecologies of support being intervened in — taking into account that these are nested within particular national and international supports and constraints. How the management of race issues within different programmes plays out through their interventions in their particular local social ecologies (that will all to a lesser or greater degree be racialised) can be explored as impact on care leavers' resilience and social capital, as those in turn play out in the young people's coping capacity. That exploration would further develop and test the logic model whilst simultaneously helping the projects involved, whether in South Africa or the US or anywhere else, articulate their work through the model. Similar description and comparison could be undertaken using the model with the range of other leaving care interventions that exist, thereby building up national comparisons of care leaving services as a whole. 6. Conclusion As leaving care becomes recognised as a global child welfare issue it becomes a pressing matter to find a shared language that is generic enough to allow exchange about different experiences but sufficiently detailed and nuanced to accurately capture the reality of the differences — not least across the North/South global divide. To make tangible improvements in the lives of care leavers where ever they live in the world on the basis of a truly global understanding requires making meaningful connections across a complex range of issues and systems situated at different levels. Sorting through these issues and managing the systems is likely to require lengthy engagement at a level of resource intensity that may be difficult to sustain, especially where individuals are working alone or in small, poorly resourced agencies. It would help greatly if logic models focusing on the social ecology of care leaving could be developed in a way that shaped and supported international exchange and comparison. Developing those models must become a part of taking forward the global agenda set by the UNCRC for leaving out of home care. References Anghel, R., & Beckett, C. (2007). Skateboarding behind the EU lorry: The experiences of Romanian professionals struggling to cope with transitions while assisting care leavers. European Journal of Social Work, 10(1), 3–19. Barn, R. (2009). Care leavers and social capital: Understanding and negotiating racial and ethnic identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–19. Broad, B. (1999). Young people leaving care: Moving towards ‘Joined Up’ solutions ? Children and Society, 13, 81–93. Cochrane, A. (1993). Comparative approaches and social policy. In A. Cochrane, & J. Clarke (Eds.), Comparing welfare states. London: Sage. Coleman, J., & Hagell, A. (2007). Adolescence, risk and resilience: Against the odds. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

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