OTHER COUNTRIES

When our three kids were young, we took our first overseas family holiday to Paris. We drove the 1,000 or so kms from Aberdeen in the North-east of Scotland, crossing the English Channel by ferry, in a small Citroen AX hatchback which was packed to the gunnels. We were heading to a camping ground in Maisons-Laffitte which was on the banks of the Seine. Had it been summer and not a very wet Easter spent in a tent, it might even have been idyllic! 

Thinking back, the campsite and Disneyland Paris aside, in this suburb, very few people we interacted with spoke English, whether that was in cafes, buying food in shops or the day that we (my fault) got on the wrong train. Today however, you’d struggle to find someone in most parts of Paris who did not speak English. English is now widely spoken across much of Europe, and increasingly Africa, South America and Asia. English is the international language of business – and social work.

For us, this means that we now have opportunities to learn about OOHC policy, research, and practice experiences from many different countries in ways that were simply not possible before. This can be through international membership organisations, journal articles, books, webinars, online forums, and YouTube. And for those of us who are lucky enough to be able to attend international conferences, the conference language is almost always English.   

So why don’t we learn more from other countries beyond the usual Anglo-American suspects? I think that there are a few reasons:

History: Most readers of these blog posts are in countries that were colonised by the British.  As such, our child welfare and OOHC systems were rooted in British ideas. The 20th century has also seen ideas and systems being adopted from the US. As such, in OOHC today with our own ways of doing things too, along with the growing recognition of indigenous thinking on the welfare of children, we can see the influence of both the US and the UK - US procedural-based legislation with a focus on programs, and UK principle-based legislation and a focus on practice. As such there are many common threads across our histories.

Time: To effectively engage with policy, research, and practice in another country you need some context of how OOHC is organised there. Otherwise, a report on OOHC in say Portugal, Brazil or the Czech Republic may make little sense to you. Today, spare time, particularly during working hours, is something that we all have very little of.

Focus: Without immersing yourself, it’s difficult to know whether what’s happening in say Portugal, Brazil or the Czech Republic will actually be of any help you to you in your day-today work. There are after all 195 different countries in the world. Focusing on other Anglo-American neoliberal countries with similar views on children, families, the economy, and the role of the State, is also less overwhelming.

However, I do worry that we sometimes risk replicating the sense of ‘exceptionalism’ that many of us react so strongly to when we see it coming out of the US (international rules don’t apply to them) or the UK (Brexit). As predominantly white, wealthy English-speaking neoliberal countries, is the quality of our OOHC so good that there really is nothing that we can learn from other countries?