Abstract
Objectives
In this presentation we intend to analyze how care professionals discursively construct the term “unaccompanied minors” (UMs) and how, in doing so, they account for their everyday practices within residential care. Relying on two specific interview datasets (collected respectively in 2008 and 2016), changes in the discursive production of representations over the years emerge.
Recently, numerous labels have been coined to describe this dramatic phenomenon: mineurs étrangers isolés, refugee children and adolescents, unaccompanied minor asylum seekers, and so forth. Each label recalls specific aspects of the extremely complex scenario – the asylum-seeking process, their (often) traumatic journey, the distance from their birth families, and so forth – and appears to be strictly connected to the country in which the hosting process takes place (Betancourt, Frounfelker, Mishra & Hussein, 2015; Carlson, Cacciatore & Klimek, 2012; Oppedal & Idsoe, 2015; Sirriyeh, 2013). Which aspect of UMs’ identities –their age, migration status or lack of family members – counts most in orienting residential care practices?
In Italy UMs are provided with the same type of care as for any other out-of-home children. In 2016 10.601 UMs were in residential care services or foster families, and an additional 4.696 were untraceable (MLPS, 2016). The scenario is not only difficult to piece together and describe, the child welfare response is also difficult to create, maintain and develop.
Method
Based on discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter, 1992), this study draws on ethnographical research in three residential care services for children based in Rome (Italy) as well as includes two different interview datasets collected in 2008 and in 2016 (Saglietti, 2012a and b) with six professionals, mainly social educators and social managers.
Results
Results show that in 2016 professionals’ social construction of UMs is more complex than in the 2008 interviews. In 2008 professionals described UMs as “lonely” and lacking agency concerning destination country choice (“They’ve been thrown here”) and a demanding attitude (“They are annoying”) connected to their economic mandate (“They arrive with a lot of requests”). In 2016 instead, the interviewed professionals profess a more nuanced, mature and active representation of UMs and, consequently, of their own work.
In both datasets professionals’ representations of unaccompanied minors are very different from “standard” out-of-home children regarding their (psychological) age, cultural background, and everyday needs. Additionally, UMs reflect numerous (existential) paradoxes (Ferradji, 2012). They have to attend Italian schools while in their birth-country some of them already worked, they no longer have control over their everyday lives even after having successfully managed a long and excruciating journey, some of them ran away from home and are “forcedly” located in a family-like environment.
These considerations impact the way care professionals balance their everyday work practices, requiring different (or even opposite) patterns of interaction and implicit intervention theories depending on the “category” of children in care (i.e. if coming from vulnerable families or if UMs).
Professionals indicate their willingness to deal with changing organizational mandates and daily practices in order to fulfill UMs’ rights to childhood , inclusion and well-being as well as balance their different needs and requests.
Conclusions
We have explored connections between professionals’ discursive representations and everyday practices that could provide practical suggestions for welfare agencies, reflections on intercultural management of residential care, and call for a closer examination of the issue. Moreover, stepping beyond care professionals’ views, we problematize how the out-of-home model of intervention based on the idea of therapeutic milieu (Palareti & Berti, 2009; 2010) must be completely revised when applied to UMs.
Residential child care , Migration and minorities in child welfare
