Abstract
Social workers have advocated closing large youth care institutions and moving to adoption, foster care and group homes. However, these approaches have proven to be costly and often disruptive of children’s lives. This study of 24 alumni of orphanages and large group homes in Trinidad and Tobago shows that the children experienced stability and happiness, with siblings kept together and almost universal secondary school graduation. Problems occurred in the transition from the homes to the community. With attention to gender in discharge policies, large group care may be beneficial and cost effective, especially for low-resource developing countries.
Introduction
The idea of large institutions caring for children and youth in great numbers runs counter to current consensus about quality care. The history of residential care across much of the world is one that is narrated today through a lens of institutional abuse, isolation, violence and a lack of individualized attention and evidence-informed care practices (Berridge and Brodie, 1998; Morton, 2002; Rothman, 1971). The new standard for quality care is said to be found in family-based care and small, community-based residential care and treatment facilities that aim for family reunification wherever possible and in the shortest amount of time.
We know enough about institutional care, particularly when tied to religious institutions, to be concerned about the experiences of young people in such settings. Retrospective investigations and research into the experiences of young people who grew up in large, institutional settings, undertaken in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and others, clearly show survivor narratives of maltreatment and negative consequences that manifest individually and across entire communities through dynamics such as intergenerational trauma (Blatt, 1992; Kendrick, 1990).
At the same time, however, there are at least two reasons why more nuance is necessary when contemplating an abrupt departure from institutional settings everywhere. First, while we may have ideas about family-based care and smaller, community-based settings that fit well with the socio-cultural and economic circumstances of the global north, the reality is that larger institutions continue to exist in abundance in many countries of the global south, including India, Brazil and many countries in Africa and East Asia (Whetten et al., 2009).
Second, although the negative and painful narratives of survivors of institutional care are real and must be taken seriously, these are not the only narratives and may overlook some of the meaningful and valuable experiences of young people growing up in these settings. Positive experiences do not justify or neutralize negative ones; it is decidedly not the goal of this article to suggest that large institutions should be maintained. Instead, the article seeks to accomplish the following two things: First, it aims to consider the narratives of individuals who grew up in larger institutions as a way of capturing, on the one hand, the dynamics and experiences within such institutions that are worth preserving or replicating even if alternative forms of care are generated through the current consensus. And second, it aims to identify the challenges encountered by young people within the larger institutions that appear to have persisted even in systems of care that have largely abandoned such institutions, focusing in particular on the transition out of care.
As an important frame of reference, the article argues that there are good reasons to distinguish what we mean by quality care in the global south versus the global north, recognizing that a binary distinction between north and south is somewhat arbitrary given the regionalization of global south and north social patterns across all jurisdictions.
The article is based on a qualitative research study undertaken in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) that sought to collect alumni narratives using oral history methods appropriate to the setting and cultural context. Below, I will provide a very brief history and description of out-of-home care in T&T, followed by briefly describing the methods for data collection and analysis. I want to centre in this article the voices of those interviewed for the study, as these are critically important in understanding retrospective narratives that are quite different from those we are commonly confronted with to support the move away from larger institutions. Finally, I will discuss ways of making meaning of these narratives in the broader context of contemplating the nuances of transitioning away from institutional forms of care as a universal principle across very diverse political economies.
Colonial system of care: The establishment of orphanages
The orphanage system for care of children, as it was developed in 19th-century Europe, was based on the belief that institutions solved many social problems, including crime, mental and physical illness, and socio-economic dependence (Morton, 2002). Attention focused on the control of ‘what were perceived as the dangerous classes, and future generations of the urban poor’ (Berridge and Brodie, 1998: 10). Commonly called ‘colonial asylums’ in the United States, the orphanages were set up by their founders ‘to incarcerate the orphan, juvenile vagrant, the abandoned child, the youngest living in poverty, and the delinquent’ (Rothman, 1971: 206). These concepts were exported from Europe to other parts of the world as part of colonial governments.
The orphanages in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) were established in the mid to late 1800s within a socio-economic context of enslavement of Africans and indentureship of Indian workers. With the end of slavery throughout the British colonies after 1834, plantation owners in T&T and other Caribbean colonies imported indentured workers, primarily from India, to prevent the freed African workers from bargaining for better wages and working conditions (Sunshine, 1988; Williams, 1970). The first children’s institution, now known as St Mary’s Children’s Home, was established in 1857 near a large sugar plantation and was intended for orphans of deceased indentured workers. It also included,
children under the age of fourteen years, found begging, wandering, destitute-not being an orphan, has no parent, guardian to provide for or control who have parents who may be unfit due to drunken habits . . . is in the company of a thief or prostitute. (Children Act, 1925, Chapter 46.01, section 44 (1))
Set up as The Orphan Asylum and Industrial School, it was a place which lodged, clothed and fed as well as taught children (Children Act, 1925, Chapter 46:01, section 37). A decade later, the second orphanage opened to ‘accommodate the many poor, wandering and homeless children of the city of Port-of-Spain’ (Williams, 2015). Many of these destitute children would have been offspring of impoverished former enslaved Africans.
The orphanages or ‘homes’ also had a political goal: the assimilation of Indian children into the British colonial culture. In 1857, the British Governor of Trinidad was quoted as saying that he hoped the orphanage ‘would provide a wonderful opportunity of westernizing the young Indian children . . . whose education will make them . . . Indian in descent but English in education and feeling, and having no home associations beyond the limits of the colony’ (Martin, 2012: 205).
These residential facilities certainly had altruistic motives of caring for suffering children. However, it can be argued that they also helped stabilize a potentially volatile economic and political situation created by numerous homeless children in the city and on plantations, which would have underscored the fundamental cruelty of the colonial economy and been a possible breeding ground of rebellion. The homes also assisted in reproducing the labour force through training the young people in desired skills while inculcating colonial cultural values.
Over the years, the population of both homes moved beyond ‘orphans’ to children whose parents might be incarcerated, addicted to drugs, sexually or physically abusive, or who neglected or abandoned the children. Today, these two homes receive the majority of their funding from the state, which funds the provision of care and other services for the children, staff wages and the maintenance of the physical infrastructure. The homes are governed by the Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church (St Dominic’s Children’s Home) and the Bishop of the Anglican Church (St Mary’s Children’s Home) with staff appointments and dismissals regulated by the government’s Public Service Association.
The resident population of St Mary’s grew from nine in 1857 to over 400 by 1940 and in 2016 stood at approximately 90 children. Overall control is vested in the board of management, which is headed by the Anglican Bishop, but the Manager does the day-to-day business of managing the affairs of the home. A similar decline in population occurred at St Dominic’s Children’s Home, which had at one time a population of 600 children, with significant numbers of children below 5 years old. In 2002, the home stopped accepting children below 4 years old. In 2016, there were approximately 80 children at the home. Interestingly, the children’s legislation from the colonial period was still in force in T&T up to May 2015. The package of children’s legislation was proclaimed by the outgoing government, including legislation which replaced the Children Act (1925) with the Children’s Authority Act, Chapter 46:10 (CRIN, 2016).
Large residential homes
As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the T&T government supports the closure of large institutions. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 64/142 adds that ‘where large residential care facilities (institutions) remain, alternatives should be developed in the context of an overall deinstitutionalization strategy, with precise goals and objectives, which will allow for their progressive elimination’ (UN General Assembly, 2010: 5).
The T&T government is developing foster care and small group home systems with, as previously mentioned, a long-term plan of closing the country’s two large residential care institutions. However, lack of information has been a challenge. It is hoped that access to adequate data on children and children issues would not be a barrier in decision-making and policy development (Children’s Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, 2014).
Methodology
In this study, I used an oral history research design. The Caribbean has an oral tradition rooted in the African oral tradition of stories being told and passed on to subsequent generations (Liverpool, 2001; Sherlock, 1966). This culturally accepted mode of relaying experience, of teaching and learning through sharing stories, fits well with using oral history as the method to elicit the experiences of the participants. In addition, a socio-demographic questionnaire was administered to all respondents prior to the start of the oral history interview.
Research method
Yow (2005) maintains that oral history is a specific research method within the general category of qualitative methodology. Oral history is a collection of human stories built around people, delivered through talk by those who may be less privileged in a way of understanding their past and the meanings they attribute to their uncommon experiences of growing up in an orphanage (Creswell, 2013; Ritchie, 2003; Shopes, 2011; Thompson, 2002).
There are many concepts in oral history methodology that fit with my research goal, my research questions and the culture of the participants. In addition to providing historical interest and relevance to an institution and form of care linked so closely to the colonial past, it also speaks about the benefits and losses of this form of childcare in developing a new model of care.
Data collection
The approach to data gathering in oral history is audio recording of a first-person account made by an interviewer with an interviewee. Oral historian Michael Angrosino (2014, personal communication) added that oral history allows the process to be open-ended; it lets the respondents structure their own stories. He added that an oral historian must provide an emphatic listening ear not just a neutral, scientific one.
I began each interview by asking the participants to talk about the residential care home where they lived (hereafter, ‘the home’), the age they were admitted and details, stories and memories that remained with them about life in the home. The interviews were guided by three main questions and some follow-up probing questions: childhood growing up in the home, school experiences, and the transition and life outside the home.
Recruitment process
Participants were selected through purposeful sampling which focuses on selecting information-rich cases where one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the study (Patton, 2002: 230). In this study, information-rich cases consisted of those who had lived in group homes and orphanages. I used snowballing to recruit participants, a relatively common form of purposive sampling where participants identify and introduce the researcher to potential participants who also identify other potential participants (Patton, 2002). Pseudonyms were employed to protect the identities of the participants.
I made telephone and email contact with lecturers at the main universities and colleges as well as the managers of the two orphanages and various group homes. I also contacted social workers at various agencies in Trinidad and those practising in Tobago.
My first participant was a former resident of a state home who had recently graduated with a Master’s degree in social work and was now a practising social worker. He used social media to help me implement the snowballing process. After our interview, he wrote a message on his Facebook page, including only friends who he knew were at the orphanage during or after his stay at the home. This resulted in calls from a number of eligible participants. I was reluctant to use Facebook as I was concerned about privacy but this participant belonged to the generation of social media users. A number of participants came through word of mouth. Most were eager to give me names and contact numbers of others who were in the home with them. They all maintained a relationship through social media.
Managers of the smaller group homes also selected individuals or gave me contact numbers of past residents. This meant there was a possibility of managers selecting past residents who they felt would tell a positive story of their lives at the homes. To counter the risk of coercion I asked those participants who were recommended by managers to identify alumni they knew who might have had different experiences while living at the home or who might have been asked to leave before the transition age. Only one participant who was recommended by the manager currently lived at the home as part of the transition programme.
Data analysis
The qualitative data were analysed using qualitative data analysis software, Atlas.ti, and manually. Agar (1991) notes the benefits of manual analysis: ‘numerous cycles through a little bit of data, massive amounts of thinking about the data, and slippery things like intuition and serendipity’ (p. 193). All interviews were taped using two smart phones – one as back up. Field notes were written after each interview both as personal reflections and to capture details that might not be included in the transcript.
After the interviews were transcribed, they were uploaded to the qualitative data analysis software. Codes were assigned to the transcripts. Memos were written to elaborate on some codes and to add insights or ideas that developed while assigning codes to the transcript. At the next stage of the analysis, the codes were reviewed and codes with similar meanings were merged.
Life in the homes
I interviewed alumni of T&T residential homes. They came from small community group homes, small- and medium-sized faith-based homes and large residential homes formerly called orphanages.
It is important to note that the children in T&T residential facilities, in the past and still today, were not seized by the state from their unwilling families. Children were sent to the homes as safe places by family and community members who could not care for them. This distinguishes the homes, in a profound way, from the residential schools of North America where Indigenous children were incarcerated and systematically abused.
Following are selected stories of the voices of the alumni. They shared their experiences of admission, life in the home, discharge from the homes and life after leaving the home. Themes that emerged from these interviews included education, religion, shaming and leaving the homes. These informed the recommendations I made for the way forward in providing out-of-home care for children and youth. As mentioned above, pseudonyms have been used to represent their voices.
I met and interviewed Albert on the grounds of St Mary’s Children’s Home, located along the east-west corridor of Trinidad in the community of Tacarigua. The home occupies a quarter of the land it once had and the fields of cane are now replaced by buildings in the form of dormitories and offices for administrative staff. One of the original buildings remains on the compound. It is a small wooden structure that was the original home of the Deputy Manager. Prior to the 1970s, the Manager and Deputy Manager lived on the compound. The church is located across the street and part of the church grounds is used as a burial place for the remains of the children who died at the home:
I got to the home in 1940. My mother and father came from Grenada. My mother had an affair with another man because she said my father was not taking care of the family. They had a fight. My father probably hurt the guy. He spent some time in jail. I think he died in jail and my mother’s boyfriend told her to put us in the orphanage. She went to court and everything to have us placed in the home. The one thing I remember is walking from the office to the hospital, which was right around here [we are in the back of the compound]. Miss Stanley was here. In those days the manager had one secretary. We had more children, almost 300-400 children. She brought me to the hospital to be quarantined . . . maybe I was not feeling well. Next day I joined the population of the orphan home and it was, you can’t describe it, peer pressure from young. I was five years old. There were three of us. It was me, my brother, who now lives in London . . . and my brother who died here, my little brother. His name was B. his name hadn’t come to this generation but he was a very liked boy, everybody had loved him . . . He fell from an orange tree. He was sent to the General Hospital. They thought he had appendicitis but he had a ruptured . . . No, they thought he had typhoid but he had a ruptured appendix, so he died. The body was tended to at the colonial hospital and then brought back here. Miss Macy was the manager and she called us together. The funeral was one of the most beautiful things here in my memory. I remember two or three funerals we had here. They used to make the casket, you can smell the varnish and you can smell the cedar. But when she came, she got Haynes funeral home to make a casket. The school was right under the – over there. The body lay in the school from about 1-3:00 pm. We had the band play and it was the most beautiful thing. He got buried over in the burial grounds across the street on the church compound.
The daily routine was that we got up in the morning at 6 o’clock. We had clean-up time. Then we had to take a shower. Sometimes boys will wet their beds and stuff. In those days it was real hard because they had no beds. They had steel frames with some boards and a sack and a sheet – that’s all they had until a new manager came in 1949. We also had chores like go to the school garden. There was also a farm with animals and chickens and we grew our own food. I did not learn anything at school. I reached fifth standard and I left school and I went to the tailor shop. They had music band, trade shop, carpenter shop, flower shop, shoemaker shop and the tailor shop. I stayed in the tailor shop until I was 16. At the end of the day, I was the best pants maker from the home, not that year but as the teacher said, for all times! I left the home in 1952 at the age of 17. I went into an after-care program in the city of Port-of-Spain. It was a hostel set up like a dormitory with 12 beds. They found us jobs but our skills were not recognized. We were not able to get full-time paying jobs. We were back to apprenticeship with as little as $3.00 a week.
Albert’s story shows the history of the home during the colonial period and the opportunities available through access to education or a trade. Being placed with his siblings allowed him to be present in the preparation of the burial service for his brother and create a lasting memory. Being discharged below the age of an adult with no support from the home was one of the negative experiences of alumni from the large residential care homes.
‘Auntie’
Miss Cathy, or ‘Auntie’, is one who falls into the rich Caribbean tradition of kinship and communal caregiving where children’s homes were established because a benevolent neighbour takes in two children, ‘then three more move in and before long a house for a family of six has been adapted to care for thirty or more’ (Jones and Sogren, 2005: 14). Miss Cathy is a 79-year-old woman who started taking care of children from a desire to help single parents in her community who needed affordable day care. She began by an announcement at her church group, ‘I offered my services to the community, asking if there is any young ladies who need help to take care of their babies so that she could go out there and work instead of moving from man to man’. Thirty years later, Miss Cathy’s place remains a home to many abandoned and neglected children.
I met and interviewed Victor at Miss Cathy’s home in the partially covered front of the house which served as a sitting area, playroom and part garage. There were long tables and benches. The room also served as an area for birthday celebrations or when there was a need for most of the children to gather in a group. There were dogs lying lazily under the tables. The home is located on a busy street so the interview was held against the noise of the private taxis seeking customers by honking their horns to potential hires. This made the taping a bit more challenging.
Victor is now 33 years old. He lived abroad for a number of years after leaving Auntie’s home. He recently returned to live in Trinidad and became Auntie’s de facto Director of the home and a positive male role model to the children at the home. During one of my visits to the home, I observed Victor consoling a baby in the most tender, paternal manner, not often seen among young males in the country. What follows is Victor’s story of life at Auntie’s home:
What we used to do, dogs and plants, we used to like [laughter] yeah boy! We did some crazy stuff. For plants, we use to walk around the neighbourhood and if your house doesn’t have plants and the next neighbour house has plenty, we used to dig up from that and plant it in your house. So, we wanted all the houses to have flowers. And then it used to have a lot of stray dogs. We used to pick them up. Plenty people used to throw them by the ravine and we used to go and pick them up and bring them home and bathe them. We had dogs, like a lot of dogs . . . Auntie use to be mad and upset and will always tell us to carry them back and we would say ‘Auntie, well, they have nowhere to go’. We would build big dog kennels for them and every morning we would clean the kennels and feed the dogs left over stuff from the kitchen. Those days we used to get a lot of soya. It was now coming in. We used to cook it and put salt and black pepper in it for them to taste it and eat it. We had a lot and then when our dogs died, we would dig a hole in the back and bury it. We would have a funeral for the dog. We would take curtain and put over our head like if we are at a funeral in church and we would play as if we were crying. What I remember, we didn’t use to have food home where I was living with my parents. When we came into the home, after a while we started getting a hot meal every day. School used to finish 5 minutes to 3. I am home by 10 past 3! Because I know we were going to get hot cook meal. My other memories were like going to church. Every Saturday we had to be in church on time. Church used to start 6 o’clock and Auntie never used to like us to be late. And the funny thing I remembered recently is that sometime between 3 and 4 she used to dress us in our vest, underwear, socks and shoes, plenty powder and sitting down there and waiting until five o’ clock to put on our actual clothes! That was a memory that I could not understand and to this day I still dress like that, to this day if I have to go anywhere I would dress, put on my underpants, my vest, my shoes and everything and then wait. As a young adult, having roommates or if I am spending time with friends, they will ask me ‘Why are you always putting on the shoes first?’ and is only then I realized it is a kind of traditional thing . . . so those things I remember clearly.
Victor’s story is significant in highlighting the difference in experiences growing up in a community style home such as Miss Cathy’s as compared to a large institution-run home. These community homes had less of a hierarchy in decision-making and more flexibility in policies which allowed for children to acquire pets and to create a more family home environment without the bureaucratic structure and rigid policies of the large institutions.
Leaving the homes
For many former residents, leaving the homes was more traumatic than their admission. Some residents would have spent a few years or their entire childhood with little meaningful contact with family. When children are placed in the homes there are no expectations to help the child stay in contact with the parents or family members or to work with the family to resolve the situation that may have contributed to the child being placed in the institution. Officially, children can be discharged from the state homes at the age of 16. If they are attending high school and are deemed to be of good behaviour, the homes will keep residents until they are 18 years. Community homes develop in-house transition programmes and residents are allowed to stay beyond the age 18 with assistance in getting a job or pursuing post-secondary education.
The transition stories that follow include homelessness, sex for a place to stay and for basic survival, and staff making private arrangements with individual residents to provide temporary room and board.
One day the welfare officer calls me to the office with no prior notification and she says to me, ‘Do you know where your father lives?’ And I replied, ‘yes’. ‘Do you know how to get there?’ And I said, ‘yes’. So she was like, ‘Okay, you can pack some clothes this evening and you can go down there and visit him tonight’. This is something I am not accustomed doing. It was like really new to me. I go and visited, spend the night whatever and I returned back to the home. Another day she asked me ‘if my father was willing to take me’ and I said, ‘yes!’ . . . Like, the next day, the same evening, she said ‘Pack up and go live with your dad!’ Yes! That was it!
‘Young woman and nowhere to go’
Gender has a major impact on the transition from a residential home. The experiences of three women are reported below. The first two are from the two large residential homes and the last is from a faith-based home:
I went to Esther House. That home is for abandoned women. I didn’t even know that. They didn’t even tell me that and I was so upset because that home is really for abandoned women. I am not abandoned. And it is for pregnant women who had been getting licks [physical assault] and thing from their boyfriend and stuff and I was like . . . like they told me the day before it was like, you going to a place but . . . you know when somebody telling you something they would make it sound alright, all okay. So, I end up going with it until I see what it is.
I was transferred to a training centre which was like a boarding school. It was connected to the nuns who ran the children’s home. At the centre there was this man was working as a supervisor in the boys’ department . . . and, well, in the home he had liked me as his, well as he told everybody, his daughter. He used to buy stuff for me like chocolate, etc. Well, you know when you not . . . you taking anything because you want to get out . . . so when I was there at the age of 18, I ran away. Because he bought a phone for me and they took it and that was a big thing and I couldn’t take it any more . . . the frustration just got to me and I just run away and never looked back . . . yeah, he [the supervisor] took me in as his daughter. Well, when I moved in with him, he told everybody that I would be his daughter, in the outside I am his daughter, in the inside I am his wife . . . because he used to turn and say, ‘If you ain’t do what I say I will put you out and you will have nowhere to go’. So, as you know you have nowhere to go, you have to do what you have to do.
Initially I left when I was 19 because we met our dad then. Well, he supposedly wasn’t well and my sister wanted to go and my brother and I decided that all of us will go so we were back together. It did not work out with our father . . . I end up homeless after that. It didn’t work out with daddy and he had put me out so I had nowhere to go. I end up sleeping not on the street but I found a little makeshift something to stay in. And it was probably one of the most down periods in my life.
‘The house parent played a key role’
Participants from the smaller homes had a different experience in the discharge and transition to independent living. Raf moved out at age of 20. He had been allowed to stay while he completed advanced high school studies. He speaks about the additional support he received from the home:
I moved out with my brothers and two other boys that were there. We all rented one apartment. We shared the rent whatever so everybody had a job and we all work separately. So, we did that for about 2 or 3 years just to help us build up and get accustomed to what the world was like on the outside. They tried to prepare you for that at the home but facing it is different, you have to really get a grasp on it. And life in itself is not always easy. We stuck together for a while, rented, made sure we got our foot on the ground . . . the home made the arrangements to get the apartment. They helped us . . . but that was in my case. There were others that were reunited with their families . . . they kind of involved us at some point. Like, where we were going to get a job and finding a convenient place to stay. Also, to try and not get a place that have long travels . . . so we did have a say in that. The house parents there were responsible for that as well as the board of directors; they all played a key role in that.
Recent policy changes increasing the discharge age from 16 to 18 is a start to addressing the problems around transitioning from the large homes. However, the lack of an aftercare programme with limited access for alumni when faced with the challenges of living outside of the institution and no transitions homes available for girls, does not bode well in maintaining the gains made from living in residential homes.
Conclusion
This article has given a brief history of out-of-home care in T&T. A common critique of studies on out-of-home care has been that the perspectives of those who lived in residential care were missing (Carp, 1996; White, 2008). In my study, I made the voices of the alumni central in contributing to the improvement of a system of care centred in the history and culture of the region. From the perspectives of those who have experienced residential care, there were features that provided them with the support they needed to become well-adjusted, productive members of their community and features which were not helpful and contributed to weakening the future potential of some alumni.
Features that worked included completion of a high school education, trade school and post-secondary degrees, stability of placement, being placed with siblings and lifelong relationships growing up in a group setting. The discharge procedures and lack of transition plans prior to discharge were shown to be the least helpful, particularly for girls and alumni from the large institutions.
There have been new developments in the residential child and youth care area since the election of a new government in 2015. The responsibility for children’s matters was removed from the Ministry of Social Development and Family Services to the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). All matters relating to the Children’s Authority, child development, children’s homes, special needs children, community residences, orphanages and gender affairs were placed in the Gender and Child Affairs Division in the OPM with a Minister attached and the Prime Minister as the voice of the Ministry in Cabinet. This is significant as it increases the profile of children’s issues and diminishes the bureaucracy in getting urgent action approved for children and youth.
In 2015, the Child Protection Unit (CPU) was established within the T&T Police Service. The role and function of the CPU are to investigate sexual offences or abuse, physical abuse, abandonment or neglect and ill treatment of all children (Mohammed, 2016). Within their first year of operation a significant proportion of the 2595 reports they investigated involved sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect. Many of these children may not be able to return to their families and as such there is a continuing need for out-of-home care facilities. It is important to note that one major initiative by the new government was to maintain the St Mary’s Children’s Home. In a recent document from the Ministry of Finance (2016), ‘2017 Social Sector Investment Programme’, among the nine initiatives identified for the fiscal year 2017 was a government promise to invest in the modernization of St Mary’s Children’s Home as well as policy and research initiatives. One research initiative was a ‘tracer study on former residents of community residences in Trinidad and Tobago’. This is an important move in recognizing residential group care as part of a range of care options for children in need of out-of-home care.
Based on the results of my research and the reflections of the alumni, I make the following recommendations for future policy directions:
Homes should be of mixed ages and genders and large enough to allow for the development and maintenance of sibling and peer group relationships;
Small community care homes should be recognized as a good care option for children;
Planning for transition from care to community should begin the moment the youngster is admitted to the institution;
Multiple placements should be avoided as being placed in one home allows for continuity of care which is important because it avoids disruption in education and school attendance;
Transition plans must incorporate means to mitigate the potential risk for girls.
The westernized form of care should not be forced on developing countries. Finding new and culturally appropriate models of care within the available economic resources of the countries is vital.
In conclusion, my study provided evidence from those who have lived in the homes that a form of residential care has the potential to offer positive outcomes for children and youth. It offers continuity of care without the multiple moves that many children in North America experience through foster-home breakdowns (Konijn et al., 2019). There are many roles for social work in group and out-of-home care in low-resource developing countries. Transition from the homes was identified as a negative among my research participants. Social workers can take leadership roles in developing transition plans from the time of admission. However, many of the participants came from families who were poor. Poverty is also an issue for the children in foster homes in Manitoba, Canada and other locales across North America. Many alumni of out-of-home care do end up in poverty. Residential homes, group homes or foster homes, even those with the highest standards, cannot tackle the roots of poverty, racism and inequality. Poverty arises at the level of economic structures. As emphasized by Petrie (2003),
If there is to be an answer to poverty, it must be a political answer, based on human equality, democratic values and a determination to challenge oppression. In the end, poverty and inequality can be eradicated only by changing social structures and by the sharing of power and advantage. (p. 77)
Working on dismantling oppressive structures is well suited for social work practice.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
