Therapeutic Residential Care: Cross-National Challenges for Policy, Research and Practice

On both sides of the Atlantic as well as other regions of the globe such as Australia, concerns abound as to the nature, purpose and efficacy of therapeutic residential care services for high-resource needing children and... [ view full abstract ]

On both sides of the Atlantic as well as other regions of the globe such as Australia, concerns abound as to the nature, purpose and efficacy of therapeutic residential care services for high-resource needing children and youth and their families. A variety of factors including media reports of both current and historical abuse, lack of consensus on critical ingredients, a comparably slim evidence-base, concerns about deviancy training and attachment and rising costs all have served as stimuli for both legislative and administrative reforms that suggest major changes for therapeutic residential care in the near future.

As the initial presenter and session moderator, Jim Whittaker (US) will both introduce the other distinguished presenters –Tore Andreassen (Norway) and Sigrid James (US and Germany)- and report briefly on the activities of a recently formed international work group convened with the common assumption that within an overall child and family services system, a properly designed, carefully monitored, well defined and well implemented high quality therapeutic residential care component should exist within a suite of intensive family and foster-family based options to offer choice to service providers as well as youth and family consumers. A Consensus Statement on therapeutic residential care (TRC) from the work group will be referenced including definition, guiding principles and development of priorities for future research.

A strong case will be made for increasing cross-national research and dialogue so that we can learn from the richness that exists in the considerable variations that characterize the nature and use of therapeutic residential services as a sub-set of group care services in a variety of states with developed social welfare systems.