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Children Webmag
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A
Place for Children
Registrations
are now open for the FICE Congress in Glasgow from 7 - 10 September
2004. It promises to be a good event. Over eighty people have registered
workshop abstracts and SIRCC, who are organising the Congress together
with Meeting Makers for FICE Scotland, has a good reputation for
putting these events together.
The
Congress hopes to cover all angles on the theme - creating physical
spaces, emotional space, the role of children in the community,
services tailored to children’s needs.
There
will be a separate conference for a hundred young people nearby,
and there will be contacts and feedback between the two events,
so that young people can feed in what they want to say to the caring
professions about the place they want in society.
The
Congress is likely to attract about 400 delegates from about 40
countries, so it is a good place to network and pick up ideas. If
you are interested, look at the Congress website.
www.sircc.strath.ac.uk/fice.2004
Running
Away
Gus
Greene focuses on absconding this month. If you read the figures
produced by the Children’s Society, running away is a major
problem. For many runaways, it is a one-off event, and they return
home or go somewhere safe, such as a friend’s house. Those
that run regularly and are absent longer are often at serious risk,
as they are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation in their search
for shelter, food or drugs.
Most
children in care today are in open settings - foster care or community
homes in urban surroundings - and they are therefore in a position
to run away. Some are in secure units. In the days covered by Gus
Greene’s memoirs, there was very little secure accommodation
as such, though some homes had locked front doors. There was greater
emphasis, though, on the prevention of absconding, and the preoccupation
with preventing it made it the source of many stories.
There
was the occasion when a deputy head thought that a game about camouflage
would be fun, and the boys took bedsheets to disguise them in the
snow. When the deputy head called out that the exercise was finished,
some of the sheets did not move. Their occupants had scarpered.
Then
there was the cross-country run, where the slower boys were sent
ahead, only to be caught and dragged back to the school by senior
boys, who thought they were absconding, causing a great melee when
the others caught up.
Or
there was the time when two boys ran off late one night, and the
head said he knew where they would be heading. His deputy had a
bet with him that he didn’t, and so at 6 a.m. the next morning
they took the school van to a village ten miles away across the
marshes, where the head predicted the boys would turn up. To avoid
being seen, they backed the van into an open garage and waited for
about an hour, chatting. No sign of the boys, so they headed back.
They had just got in when the police rang to say the boys had given
themselves up in the village. The head and the deputy quizzed them,
and they explained that they had gone across the marshes during
the night, and at dawn had been going through a village when they
heard a van approaching, so they had dived into an open garage for
cover. The van had backed into the garage and two blokes had been
chatting in it for about an hour before driving off again …...
So
much for the stories. Those who absconded tended to commit offences,
and so built up a record and a habit of running and offending. So
preventing running away was important then, and we suspect it is
important still today. Preventing running away should be a matter
of relationships, demonstrating care and providing stimulation,
though, not coercion and security.
The
Things They Say
Small
boy to mother : A girl hit me at school today.
Mother to small boy : Did you hit her back?
Small boy to mother : No. (Pause.) I hit her front.
Overheard
on the Radio
"A
spokesman for the Association of Cheese Police Officers said …"
(Presumably
a Big Cheese)
cuttings...
