A THOUGHT ON DEATH!

This week I have been thinking about death, children in residential and foster care, and care leavers.

At the beginning of my career, with my shiny new social work qualification, I worked with children and young people in what today we would call therapeutic residential care. I still believe that if done well, residential care with the right children, at the right time and in the right way, can and should be a highly positive experience with beneficial lifelong impacts. Even back then we clearly recognised that residential care was a very ‘intimate’ way of working and our ethos was heavily influenced by the Austrian-American child psychoanalyst and educator Fritz Redl (his concept of the Life Space Interview is still used today as an ‘intervention’ that uses daily living situations to nurture and inspire positive purposeful relationships). Like many other former ‘resi’ workers, 30+ years on I can still remember the faces of those that we worked with, and most of their first names too (an ‘intimacy’ of course that we have seen abused by so many others).

The third and final residential unit I worked in before moving into management, was in Fraserburgh, a fishing town in the North East of Scotland (which amongst other things had a major heroin problem at the time). Angus and his brother Peter (not their real names) had come into care after their father, who was their sole carer, was imprisoned for sexual offences against children. They were just about the youngest in the group, had a range of needs and also attended a Special Needs School. We might have called Angus ‘needy’ at the time – perhaps today we’d say he was seeking connection and belonging. 

While we had a cook during the week (‘Cookie’ was one of the most important members of staff), it was normal for the residential staff to cook at the weekends and it was also an opportunity to engage differently with the kids. At that children’s home we ate well anyway, but at the weekend we ate particularly well as the weekend numbers were always less predictable and, just in case, the cook always ordered far more food than we’d ever need. 

I remember one weekend when we had a massive joint of topside beef for just a few of us, which in today’s money I would imagine must have cost over $100 and the likes of which I have never seen since! However, on seeing it Angus’s response – “Matheson not f*cking roast beef again – you lot are too f*cking mean to buy us chicken” (for younger subscribers chicken back then, in the UK at least, was a much cheaper food than it is today)! A few years later I heard from a colleague that Angus had died of a drugs overdose. An isolated case? Maybe. But didn’t  Michelle who was also in the unit, and happened to be Angus’s cousin, not die in a car crash just after she left, and what about that other kid in the residential unit nearby who also died in a traffic accident? 

Outside of Scandinavia, where their systems do enable researchers to access comprehensive high quality data on the outcomes of those formerly in OOHC, including death (for example Bo Vinnerljung’s 2008 article: Into adulthood: A follow-up study of 718 young people who were placed in out-of-home care during their teens), I have seen very little research on this area, and we talk about it even less! However, following a recent spate of care leaver deaths in British Columbia, a Coronial Inquiry published last year found that over a six year period there were 200 (!) deaths amongst Ministry of Children and Family Development-involved (broader than just former OOHC) youth transitioning to independence (BC has about the same population as Victoria, NSW or New Zealand). They died at 5 times the rate of others aged 17-25, and represented 13% of all deaths for all reasons across this age group. Indigenous care leavers were even more over-represented. As well as high numbers of suicides (49) and accidental deaths (123) which presumably includes drug overdoses and traffic accidents, I was particularly surprised to see that 8 died of “natural diseases” and 14 were murdered. Does that not blow your mind too! How much do you know about the situation in your jurisdiction?  

I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz

Kia kaha (Stay Strong).

Iain