So called Justice, Mental Health, Psychosocial and Developmental needs

Thanks for posting @Appleblossom . I don't have lived experience of residential care but care deeply about the intersectionality of disadvantage and justice outcomes.

Availability of appropriate housing or accommodation plays into availability of bail for youth and adult offenders, disproportionately affecting some cohorts - I was thinking First Nations and CALD but doubtless also those in or exiting residential care.

The other day I read of a Canadian study indicating the high incidence of acquired brain injury among the homeless... those with ABI being overrepresented by a factor of 10. I was already aware of a mental health connection.

I also read that highly successful Housing First initiatives in the US are being cancelled on ideological grounds as those with AOD and MH concerns are perceived as undeserving unless and until they've been "cured".

There's a movement towards shelter in appropriate housing (in which I include provision of caring and compassionate and culturally appropriate out of home care) being recognised as a foundational human right.

I've urged SANE on a number of occasions to remain abreast of the intersectionality of mental health with many other measures of disadvantage including homelessness, justice and domestic violence. On the latter issue I was unable to mention trials indicating relative success in treating perpetrators with antidepressants but perhaps I'll be able to couch it in those general terms.

Being able to see the bigger picture is so important. Over the last 12 months I've also noted how the business problems of Healthscope hospitals could spill over into a crisis in private inpatient mental health services (federally administered) impacting staterun public mental health hospital capacity. Healthscope is now on the cusp of reinventing itself as Not For Profit hopefully removing itself from this particular neoliberal dilemma. I understand this was a possible solution @RachSANECEO had canvassed.

I'd definitely encourage SANE to broaden its monitoring from Stigma Watch to intersectionality.

I hope @Till23 and @chibam don't mind being tagged here.

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@Dimity wrote:

I hope @Till23 and @chibam don't mind being tagged here.

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Not at all, @Dimity! 🙂

But to be honest, I don't really know what to do with this article.

It talks about these kids throwing glasses of water and blocks of butter at their foster carers. I don't think I ever witnessed a kid doing anything so violent towards a parent/authority figure throughout my entire childhood, and I know that if I had, I would've been mortified!

These kids are incomprehensibly different from the kid I was, and yes, that probably is down more to 'nurture' rather then 'nature'. But the fact remains that some switch has been flipped in them that has made them capable of behavior I would've considdered unthinkable.

A big part of me can sympathize with the carers, police, and broader society who may be inclined to treat these kids more like dangerous wild animals then a typical human being, because in my world, civilized human beings don't behave in that sort of way.

Imagine inviting someone into your home, and never feeling confident that they won't do you serious harm. Isn't that more or less the plight of people who find themselves in domestic abuse relationships?

I don't want to dismiss the horrid backstories of these unfortunate kids. But I also can't bring myself to value their recovery over the safety and sense of safety of all the people who are tasked in contributing to their recovery.

Stories like the ones in this article make me wonder if the currant usage of police in these scenarios is justified and appropriate; and if scaling back the police presence might leave the carers more vulnerable to harm by the violent kids (however small a percentage of foster kids they may be).

But perhaps that's just my ignorance shining through. The world this article describes is not my world. I have no personal experiance to guide my perspective on this.

I spent 10 years working in out of home care, starting out as a youth worker in a residential house. It was like the ones mentioned in this article, 4 kids, usually between the age of 12-18, staffed 24/7 on a rotating roster. No mixed gender houses and you’d usually have a house of younger aged kids and then older aged.

it’s been 10 years since I’ve worked there, well actually longer, as I was asked to set up a new house (lots involved in that) and be a temp coordinator of that house and then oversee another houses move, wasn’t given the permanent roles when applying for it, so applied to be a case manager- which I got and then worked more closely with foster kids. But anyways…..

Back then there were a lot of policies and procedures around police involvement. These kids would abscond a lot and we were required to notify and reporting them as a missing person straight away. The police got sick of this very quickly. I was actually told by one police officer that I needed to do my job better. We could touch these kids, like we couldn’t restrain them and stop them from leaving, so how?

property damage was a very frequent occurrence. Which again, the policy was that it was reported to police. Assaulting each other also. There were many avos taken out amongst residents.
I remember after taking a few boys to an nrl game one Friday night, parked on the side of the road for nearly 2hrs as they were fighting, throwing things around the car and it was unsafe for me to drive. I remember one kid smeared poo on all the door handles. Many a shift I would actually cry all the way home. A number of occasions I actually had to call the on call service to have my shift replaced because I couldn’t continue any further cause I didn’t feel safe. One kid just had it in for me.

but the stuff some of these kids had been through is unimaginable. The trauma and abuse, very often from their own parents which eventually resulted in their removal. I once, no twice, had the opportunity to go into facs… or docs…. Or whatever they call themselves now, to go in and read through some of their files. All the records, all the reports leading up to their removals, and it’s really no wonder these kids are so messed up and broken.
i ended up not spending too much time in the resi side of things, much preferred the foster side of it. But that also had its issues too. (Carers just doing it for money, most kids came with a $100 a night pay cause we were intensive care and the constant need to meet our funding numbers and putting kids in placements that weren’t suitable).

these are some of our most vulnerable kids. And just like the mh system, the oohc system is very broken too. I actually bumped into my old big boss late last year and her and a group of others had broken away and started a new type of residential care, the first of its kind of Australia. I don’t know much about it but hopefully it’s a big improvement.

well sorry that’s been so long! But I got so many stories.

Sounds a tough gig @Bow . I respect that you still have compassion for the kids. Broken kids, broken system. I hope that new model of residential care works out.

@Appleblossom I’m sitting here shaking my head. I stand in solidarity with you. You have every right and reason to speak your truth.

People do not like to hear about system failures, it makes them uncomfortable. Scapegoating and victim blaming is my lived experience. From people with faith. Love irony.

Wow, @Bow .

Having actually worked with these sorts of kids, do you think there's any genuine chance of... I won't say 'fixing' them - but rather, creating a mutually-amicable compromise between them and the rest of society?

Or is there just no hope for them?

When people talk about these systems, they use words like "rehabilitation", as if their buy-and-large a happy ending factory. But then you watch/read the news stories and it sounds like the government (and probably society as a whole) only commit the bare minimum to these systems simply so that it looks like their doing something meaningful. And then you read the stories about how unruly these kids actually are, and you really have to wonder if someone can really come back from that to be compatable with the rest of society.

I absolutely believe that the majority of these kids can be… I actually hate using the word rehabilitated, but I can’t think of anything else @chibam yes they can be ‘fixed’ and we should never come to the conclusion that ‘there just isn’t any hope for them’.

I can’t help but think of us folks here, yeah maybe we didn’t end up in the OOHC system, but we are very broken and some are damaged due to the trauma we have had inflicted upon us. The system, the health department and ourselves can’t give up on us either.

Early intervention is so so so key. And while the idea of passing off case management onto non government agencies like the one I worked for, it’s leaves the system with very very little involvement. There needs to be way more accountability. I knew if stuff that was happening but was powerless to do anything about.

The majority of the kids I worked with were in some kind of therapy. We had fortnightly team meetings with specially trained psychologist. Every kid had a behaviour support plan developed by said psychologist. But a lot of the time you were unstaffed to be able to put any strategies into place and you were just trying to survive.

there needed to be a huge work done

@Glisten Thank you

@Dimity

@Bow Thank you for the doing and caring about the work with these kids. It matters and a few good memories can make a difference over a life ttime.

I have a neighbour who left Protective Services, cos she burned out. Not because the kids were all bad, but it was a mix between dealing with cynical workers who disagreed about the right way to proceed and disturbed kids and complicated not good situations.

I left before I was totally institutionalised. Still young enough to mostly live all my life with respect for genuine legitimate authority. I dont take it all personally, I also have related to Care Leavers over the last 15 years. Personalities, long term outcomes, and issues vary.

Dumping all the kids in so called "care" into the same behaviour category as the worst offenders is plain erroneous and dumb. Not good for the kids or the workers, or the rest of society.

There is absolutely a lot of burn out @Appleblossom i think more in the actual government services side of things, yeah our organization had a bit of turn over, but not as much.

and totally not all kids are like the types that you hear about. I’ve actually reconnected with one girl that I worked with. She’s doing alright in life, got married and has had some kids. Another girl I worked with went to Tafe and got some qualifications and now works with the organization. Oh and another young fella has his own small business and attends one of the markets that I go to. He still lives with his foster carers after aging out of care. I think that’s an area that needs a bit of work too, after care. And preparing kids for leaving care. I started working on a leaving care planned before I went on maternity leave.

This topic is so close to my heart but I really don't have any answers @Appleblossom @Bow

I've also worked with a lot of OoHC children. It's not easy. I've seen and heard of things they have been exposed to.

I really don't know.