Children Webmag -

News of FICE’s Federal Council’s recent meeting in Denmark

Roskilde stands at the head of a fjord - Roskilde Fjord actually - and it was the ancient capital city of Denmark, with a population of 10,000 in mediaeval times. The kings and queens of Denmark are still buried in the lofty brick cathedral, but the capital moved in the eighteenth century to Copenhagen, a short train ride away. Indeed, it was when the railway eventually arrived that the city started to grow again, having shrunk to just 1,800 inhabitants.

The city now has 53,000 people and a university. It remains a small gem, although every July its population is swelled by 17,000 rock fans who swamp the area for a festival.

Roskilde still has a strong Viking flavour, and its museum contains no fewer than five boats from the Viking era, including a longship. The boats had been sunk in the fjord as a defensive measure about a thousand years ago, and the mud preserved them until the archaeologists came along.

No doubt it was from Roskilde Fjord that many of the raids on the coasts of England set out when the Danes went a-viking - on a raid to plunder the monks and farmers across the water. It was therefore somewhat alarming to see that hard by the museum they are once more building longships. Another invasion being planned?

It was even more worrying when we reached the venue for the FICE meeting as it was labelled Slagteriskolen. Trying to work out what the Danish might mean, we thought of Slaughter School, but unless there really was a plot to restart Viking raids, this seemed unlikely. However, we were not far out; it actually proved to be a college for teaching about butchery, and originally had had an abattoir on site. Indeed, in the room where the Federal Council met there was a large oil painting of dead animals, hanging up and done in graphic shades of blood-red. Now, however, the college teaches about catering, and the Federal Council was well looked after.

There were over thirty delegates from about twenty countries at the meeting. The business was kept as brief as possible to allow time for papers with professional content.

Andrew Hosie reported on the formal founding of FICE-Scotland, and progress concerning the Congress being planned for Glasgow in 2004. There was discussion of possible new members in Albania, Belarus, Ireland, Malta, Nepal and South Africa. Daniel Vidaud told of the contacts he had made with representatives of ten countries in francophone North Africa. The major problems which they shared were the disastrous impact of HIV/AIDS, and the drift of young people to the cities. A further meeting was planned, to be held in December in Bukina Faso, to focus on the needs of refugee children.

One unhappy piece of news was that ANCE-France was in the process of being wound up as we met. ANCE had been one of the founder members of FICE, and it had a well-deserved reputation for providing training, seminars and publications, and it offered a valued professional lead, with a membership involving thousands of childcare establishments and their workers. Business problems in a subsidiary organisation had undermined ANCE’s financial stability, and it had had to progressively reduce its operations to the point that the Government had withdrawn its support. Shortly, Daniel Vidaud and Daniel Collombet announced, ANCE would cease to exist, but they anticipated that a phoenix organisation would shortly arise from the ashes. The training college which ANCE had run in Grenoble would continue, but under local control.

Albert Likhanov spoke about the Children’s Day organised by the Russian Children’s Fund each year in Moscow on the first of June. Ten thousand children descend on Moscow, parade and attend the theatre free (with fifteen theatres providing performances free of charge), - a good public relations exercise for childcare.

There was a proposal to site the General Secretariat in Bulgaria, a request to complete a questionnaire about member countries, discussion about the Stockholm Declaration, a proposal for vetting research, and news about the next Federal Council meeting, to be held in Venika, a Bulgarian resort about a hundred kilometres from Sophia.

A briefing was provided on developments in South East Europe. The scale of problems following the war was massive. In Bosnia Herzegovina, for example, there were now 4,500 children with no parents and 30,000 with only one. While having to meet their needs, there was also a move to avoid having large centralised institutions. In consequence there were now support services in the community helping families and schools, and children had been placed in boarding schools and small children’s homes.

Meanwhile, FICE had been active in running the Friendships Camps (already reported on in the Webmag) and setting up expert conferences. Projects had also been started such as the hairdressers’ shop which employed young care-leavers. These projects were particularly important because of the fear for children’s welfare on leaving care.

Much of this work had been started through international contacts, such as support from Rolf Widmer and Roland Stubi from Switzerland and Anton Tobe and other contacts in the Netherlands.

Laszlo Czokay reported that In 1999 a new Youth Work Act had been passed in Hungary. This was a landmark, as the previous legislation about children had been more than a hundred years earlier. The development of the legislation had taken ten years, but the process had been managed well, and the outcome was good. The problem was the cost of implementation, in view of current economic difficulties.

The basic principle underlying the Act was the right and responsibility of families to bring up children. Indeed, it was made explicit that no child should be removed for financial reasons. It was intended that children’s basic needs should be met within families by supporting them through a battery of services such as kindergartens, “day care mothers” who each looked after up to a dozen children, surrogate families for little children and emergency accommodation if evicted.

Some of these elements were not yet working, there was a lack of trained staff, and the pressure on staff led to high staff turnover. As a result, more children were still in residential and foster care placements than had been anticipated. Foster parents were of two sorts :

- traditional fosterparents, who could not take more than five children, and who received allowances to cover the costs but with only symbolic pay, and
- professional fosterparents who could take a maximum of eight children and at least one of whom had to be trained.

Overall, the number of children in care had dropped from 25,000 (1% of all children) to 17,000 (or 0.87% of all children). Most were either under 1 year old or over 14 years of age. Those leaving care were mostly young; the situation concerning many older children was felt to be hopeless and they tended to remain in care. There was a shortage of specialist places, for drug users for example, so that they were placed in ordinary children’s homes, creating problems.
Psychological and psychiatric support was provided.

Residential homes were now restricted to a maximum of 40 children, and a typical model had just twelve children with five staff, the head of home being university-trained.

The new smaller homes had been set up speedily and some were in isolated areas, far from schools and lacking access to sports facilities and treatment services. This meant that staff dissatisfaction led to high turnover, children’s rights were not always protected, but poor standards were less visible.

All children in care were reviewed annually, or six-monthly for children aged 3 or under, but a weakness of the system was that while a child was in care, little work was done with his/her family.

Aftercare had been improved and accommodation was offered up to the age of 24 (or 25 if at university), such that there were now 4,500 young people receiving aftercare.

Professor Ewan Anderson spoke of a five-year project he had managed at the end of the First Gulf War. It was a large-scale project, based in the north of the country in the area bordering on Iran, and it was started by mapping the area as a whole, identifying the 4,800 villages and their resources, especially relating to the needs of children. These were plotted using the Geographic Investigation System (GIS) by a core team of a dozen workers from several countries, who then recruited larger numbers of Iraqi people to undertake the detailed local work - 30 in the office and 100 elsewhere.

The capital city of the area was Urbil, the oldest city in the world, but much of the area was mountainous, causing communication problems and offering limited opportunities for agriculture. The War had caused damage to the area’s agriculture, and the economy was reliant on the sale of oil to import food. The Tigris ran through the area, and there were tensions when water was diverted or there were plans to reduce the flow to the south.

In relation to children, the survey covered many areas, including nutrition, schooling, health and work. Surveys were also undertaken to cross-check the validity of the survey. A 22-factor data-base was drawn up, and put on a digitised master map. Charts were then produced which demonstrated the typical distance which people had to travel to get water, the availability of maternity services, health, literacy, school provision (many having been destroyed) and numbers of teachers. Information was sent back to Durham University in England, where it was processed.

The project then moved on to making provision for children. They found 770 children in residential care, and thousands who were traumatised. The project only employed married women at first in order to avoid problems. The first staff were selected and trained by the staff based in the United Kingdom, but they in turn selected and trained Iraqi people to work on the ground. Generic childcare training was provided. Services were mainly provided by local NGOs.

Running a project in these circumstances presented problems. For a start there were two governments, each with its set of ministers, covering the same area. The team had to manage drought conditions. Large areas were mined, and it was unsafe to work in them, so that people were moving to the towns. Security was a problem, and the team had to be serious about taking precautions, for example in hiring guards.

Ewan ended by proposing that FICE should develop a generic training course in childcare, and that it should adopt education sans frontieres as one of its projects.

Services in Roskilde

The Federal Council was finally given a description of the services offered to children in the host city of Roskilde. There were 88 staff in all, including four teams of social workers organised geographically, and a team for children with disabilities. There was a family treatment centre with psychologists and other advisers, and there were people who provided domiciliary support for families. There were unattached youth workers, mentors and “contact workers” who acted as intermediaries between young people and their parents. Group work was undertaken with those who had lost self-confidence or failed at school.

Section 32 of the Danish childcare law stated that services had to be provided in the best interests of children, providing early support at home or nearby, evaluating every intervention, working with the family and aiming to provide continuity and stability.

The Roskilde Modelen was a handbook, providing guidance on the services to be offered at four levels of intervention - children with minor problems, those with special needs (such as disabled children), those with essential needs and those with what were described as “obvious” needs.

Specialists could be involved in assessing needs, and if a child were to be removed from home against his/her parents’ wishes, a panel including a psychologist and local politicians took the decision. Lawyers were provided for parents (and separately for young people over the age of 15) at these hearings.

A key feature of children’s services was their close co-operation with other agencies - police, employers, sports, schools, youth clubs, and the statutory departments.

There was a meeting with the Mayor in the grand Radhus, or Town Hall, followed by visits to the cathedral and the Viking museum. As usual, FICE delegates managed to find pubs and restaurants as well. Back at the college, Soeren Hegstrup and Audo Kuduzovic led with guitars in a traditional FICE after-dinner singing session which lasted into the small hours, with songs from every country present, and a few more besides.

Visiting children’s services brings out interestingly different reactions in the visitors. On the one hand, in seeing places and meeting children and childcare staff at work, one clearly gets a much better idea of what is going on than simply hearing a presentation. On the other hand, visitors are often worried about impinging on the privacy of the children and young people whose home it is.

The first visit was to a unit for six young people which appeared to offer a sort of cross between residential childcare and fostering. It was a private home set in a village in Holbaek with good communication with nearby towns, and it was indistinguishable from the other family houses around it. Before being a home, it had consisted of two flats.

There were three staff, two of whom (Lone Madsen and David Lohmann) had worked together for several years, and one of whom had joined them recently. All three worked flexible hours. There was a sort of rota based on a 40-hour working week to ensure that someone was around, but the approach was more that of parents or fosterparents. Working there was virtually full-time, but with the opportunity to do other things and leave the home unattended.

The young people ranged in age from teenage up to the low 20s. Most had had disturbed childhoods and now needed somewhere that could offer a combination of personal space and stability until they were ready to be independent. It was a common experience that they had had everything done for them while they were in foster care or residential care, and they were not ready to look after themselves independently. Some of the residents also needed psychiatric support.

The building was divided into half a dozen small flats or bedsits, and was being constantly adapted to match the changing needs of the residents. The young people had the opportunity to cater for themselves, but shared some meals together, especially when there were the Monday group meetings. They were provided with mobile phones, which were not misused. It was for the young people to keep the unit clean, and there were no domestic staff.

There were no written rules either, and restrictions or requirements varied from one young person to another, depending upon their needs and circumstances. Some had partners sharing their accommodation.

The FICE visit had been used as an opportunity to discuss how guests should be treated, and the residents had tidied their rooms, though some visitors were still reluctant to enter their private space, despite the residents’ agreement to it.

The second visit was to a home on the island of Oroe, and its play area led to down to the water’s edge. The home for about thirty children had been in existence for over a hundred years, having been founded in 1901 by a priest who was concerned at the way that young offenders were being treated. In the 1800s there were children as young as 12 in prison in Denmark, including those who had stolen bread to survive. The priest collected money, with a lot of support from the teaching profession, and so the home was originally a private foundation, though now funded by the Government.

It is the view of Troels Lohmann, the head of the home, that it is not the children who have problems, but parents and schools. The home’s most unusual feature was that there was also a zoo on site, called the Savannah, with a very wide range of animals. There were a couple of large crocodiles, quite a few snakes, llamas, goats, ostriches, racoons and quite a variety of other small mammals in pens and cages.

About 15,000 visitors a year come to see the Savannah, and the children and young people in the home not only play a major role in caring for the animals but also act as the guides for the visitors. They are therefore able to play valued roles where they can take responsibility, both for the animals and the visitors.

The Danish FICE Section were good hosts, and thanks were due to Soeren Hegstrup, Ole Rasmussen and his wife for the hard work they put in to organising the event. The setting was excellent, the business was conducted expeditiously, interesting papers were given and the services visited were innovative. What more could we ask?