A
14 year old girl needs a home, a residential care facility, someone to care for
her. No child and youth care centre, no foster home wants her and attorneys
advocating for the child are seeking a high court order to compel at least one
institution to take her in and develop a permanent care plan for her. The girl
entered the care system at the age of two and has been raped on numerous
occasions since the age of 4. She was placed in a series of children’s and
foster care homes, all of which failed to deal with her behavioural problems
which include sexual promiscuity. She has not been to school for years and has
no family or guardian to protect her interests.
Moira
Simpson, founder and Director of the Kids Haven, a child and youth care centre
in Benoni, has the following to say about the problems facing social workers
and other professionals trying to find appropriate care and therapeutic
intervention for this child and many others whose exposure to horrific and
ongoing abuse since early childhood has left them with deep emotional and
psychological wounds which in turn express themselves in what is referred to in
professional jargon as ‘conduct disorders’, or ‘anti-social behavior’.
“It
is one thing working with children on an outpatient basis, and totally another
working with them in residential care. Children with anti-social personalities
and conduct disorders and/or those who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, are
difficult to place because no matter what you try you fail to reach them. So
everyone rejects the problematic child to avoid admitting the seriously damaged
child, and then when things get tough being told ‘it is your child, deal with
them’ when they do not cope.’ It would be better not to label them ‘conduct disorder’;
because once this label has been affixed the children have no chance of being
accepted by anyone.
In
fact, the system is not working for these children at all and children are
repeatedly failed by parents, families, foster care settings, the community,
society, and education. Most children have multiple placements that break down.
The whole system needs to be re-thought.
Some
of the children need to be assigned a capable adult around the clock. At any
one time four adults may be needed to contain, manage, and care for one child,
including security personnel. It could take a whole team of professionals to
attend to the needs of this one child. Resources get stretched, as they smash
windows, toilets, doors, let off fire extinguishers, cut CCTV camera, break TV’s,
light fittings, and much more.
Worse
than this is what they are capable of doing to staff and other children. In the
past there were always a few extremely problematic children who would fall
through the cracks and land up in jail, but now there are huge numbers of
severely disturbed children needing specialized and resource-intensive
interventions with barely any services available for them. Far too many of these
children also have cognitive deficits and most of these require permanent long
term care, as will never be able to function independently. But there is nowhere for them to go. Child
care organizations are collapsing under the strain, and going to the high court
to force them to take the children could be the final straw for them.
Everybody has a different standard of what difficult behaviour
is. Some children described as ‘monsters’ are just acting out at the neglect,
abuse and trauma they are experiencing, and with proper care and intervention
are able to heal and thrive beyond expectation. For others the damage is too
deep.
Kids
Haven tries to give all children a chance, but would like the system to allow
us to ‘give the child back to go deeper into the system’ if we find we
cannot meet the child’s needs, and often this need to be immediate, after a
serious incident. If it turns out that that one child is single handedly
destroying the organisation, we need to be able to say no. If we are not able
to give them back at this point, KH will also have to be more careful about the
children we admit in the future, and unfortunately some children we would have
reached will lose out.
I
am sure other organisations would be more willing to accept a child if they
knew there was some recourse should they not cope. But again, at what level
would that be?
The
child being removed needs some form of intensive and secure care. At the moment
children have to commit a crime, face arrest and conviction before there is any
effort at getting them “deeper into the system.” Could we not spare our most
damaged children this additional ordeal and get them into specialized and
contained care settings long before it reaches this point?”
The JCAF Team
