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Volume 4 No.1 — February/March 2005 Editorial ‘Nae too bad’: Job Satisfaction and Staff Morale in Scottish Residential Child Care Andrew Kendrick, Ian Milligan and Ghizala Avan 22 ‘Saving’ the Child in Victorian Dundee Chrissie Urquhart 33 Good Enough Care? Looking After Sexually Abused Young People in Residential Settings Autumn Roesch-Marsh 45 Scottish Anti-Poverty Policy and Looked After Young People Peter Kelly 59 “A Different Way to Look at Things”: The Development of Consultancy in a Residential Service for Children and Young People Andrew Kendrick 67 Childhoods: Experiencing an International Conference Irene Stevens and Laura Steckley 80 Editorial Being based at SIRCC gives you an overview of the issues affecting children and young people in care. In this instance, I have chosen to use the words ‘in care’ quite deliberately. I remember when the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 changed the terminology and we began to talk about ‘looked-after and accommodated’ children. This became further shortened over the years to ‘LAAC’ or even ‘LAC.’ I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who gets a little disturbed by such changes in language? I think it sounds cold and somewhat distant. When looking through the articles for the current edition of the journal in my new role as co-editor, I was continually struck by the concept of care, and what it actually means. I was also struck by the idea that, as residential workers, we are responsible for a special kind of care; a care that is different from others who work in the ‘caring professions.’ The kind of care that residential workers should offer rejects impartiality, insists on the need to be sensitive to others, and emphasises the central place of concern and sentiment. I recently came across a book called Caregiving (Gordon, Benner & Noddings, 1996) and I think this was one of the first books I have read that actually started to describe to me what I did as a residential worker. Noddings, who co-edited the book, indicated, that care means that there must be a close inter-relationship between the cared-for and the care-giver, and care is not happening unless the person who is cared-for actually experiences the feeling of being cared-for (Noddings, 1996). She says that the experience of being cared for makes us feel worthwhile. However, she was critical of some of the agencies set up to ‘care.’ This brings me back to my original point. Can all residential care units say that they ‘care’ for their children and young people? Or is the task purely to ‘look after and accommodate?’ I would argue that creating a feeling of being ‘cared-for’, as Noddings describes it, is one of our key functions as workers. It may be that the child or young person in our unit has never experienced really being ‘cared-for.’ It may be that their behaviour makes it difficult for us to ‘care for’ them. However, I think Urie Bronfenbrenner, the famous psychologist, got it right when he said, ‘development, it turns out, occurs through this process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else—especially somebody who's crazy about that child’ (Bronfenbrenner, cited in Andrews, Biggs & Seidel, 2001). I like that idea…simple, uncomplicated and a reasonably good guideline for practice! Irene Stevens References Andrews, R., Biggs, M. & Seidel, M. (Eds.) (2001). The Columbia world of quotations. Retrieved September 2005, from http://www.bartleby.com/66/52/8352.html Gordon. S., Benner. P. & Noddings. N. (Eds.) (1996). Caregiving: Readings in knowledge, practice, ethics and politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Noddings, N. (1996). The cared-for. In S. Gordon, P. Benner & N. Noddings (Eds.), Caregiving: Readings in knowledge, practice, ethics and politics (pp. 21-39). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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