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Listen to thisI was over in Dublin last week, where I do some work with one of the youth care facilities. By a strange set of coincidences, two former colleagues from Edinburgh now live and work in Dublin where they hold senior positions in child welfare services. We took the opportunity to meet up for a beer to watch Celtic in the UEFA Cup final. (For the non-footballing nations in the Child and Youth Care community, Celtic is a Glasgow club with its roots in the Irish diaspora). They had reached the final of a European tournament for the first time in 33 years. Fifty thousand Celtic supporters, many of them without tickets, travelled to Seville in Spain where the game was held. Given Celtic’s associations with Ireland, Dublin seemed an appropriate place to watch the game. (Dubliners are called Dubs – hence the tabloid headline above which I couldn’t resist.)
Inevitably, when Child and Youth Care workers get together, they start to reminisce; remember so and so, whatever happened to him/her? Do you ever hear from …? The characters, the situations and perhaps more than anything the laughs are paraded and relived.
At one point, I can’t remember if it was at half time or in the post match melancholy (Celtic were beaten in extra time – another glorious Scottish failure!), one of us touched on questions of being a man working in residential care and on how our sexuality can edge into the relationships we have with youth. At one level this seems such an obvious statement of fact – our sexuality is integral to ourselves and, because as Child and Youth Care workers ‘self’ is what we trade in, then we can’t detach that part of ourselves when we enter into relationship. So obvious, yet in this climate it can sound a bit of an unguarded, even a foolhardy thing to say – the kind of thing you only acknowledge after a few beers and in the company of friends. All three of us had obviously processed our own thoughts and feelings on the matter to a point where we were comfortable with them and could ensure that that our sexual selves became healthy and creative forces in our practice.
But we had done so only in our own heads. None of us had used supervision as an opportunity to explore the occasions when there was undoubtedly a sexual chemistry in some of our encounters with youth. Having been supervisor to both of these colleagues at different stages, I suppose I need to take a bit of responsibility for that, but in mitigation I would have to say that the wider climate was not conducive to such discussion. I recall a situation where a member of staff was allegedly fired for raising issues of possible sexual attraction in supervision. Now I don’t know the full details of the case, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case – so foreclosing and repressive is the morality which is brought to bear on all things sexual. I recounted the vaguely uncomfortable feeling of trying to raise issues of sexuality and self with a group of undergraduates I was teaching recently. They backed off from it at a rate of knots. One of my mates suggested that this was the kind of headwork that students could only take on once they reach Masters level. I know what he means but, there again we don’t just let them loose on kids once they’ve got a Masters degree.
Now all of this got me thinking. If we three, albeit with the benefit of a few pints of Guinness, could acknowledge, in remarkably similar ways, the intrusion of our sexuality, perhaps more specifically our masculinity, into our practice, then we were certainly not alone in our experiences. What level of repressed sexuality lurks beneath the surface in every Child and Youth Care facility? The symptoms of this denial or repression of sexuality – and again specifically of masculinity – are all around us. They’re there in the in the macho management styles of those who hold power in organisations; they’re there in the brittle, control-oriented practices of many of the men who work in residential care, those who would really like to get closer to kids but who are scared to do so in case that sexual shadow self raises its head.
Issues around masculinity take on a particular significance at this point in time when there seems to be a fairly universal difficulty in attracting men to care work. Perhaps that’s hardly surprising when we sideline and vilify them within a protectionist discourse in which they are inhibited from exploring some of the fundamental dimensions of their beings.
Personally, I’m fed up apologizing for being a man in child care. I’m fed up reading assignments where male students feel the need to recite mea culpas just for being male. Sure there are darker sides to masculinity that we need to face up to. But there are also many areas where it can be an essential and life-giving force in the Child and Youth Care relationship. Interestingly, the three of us talking together last Wednesday night were all workers who made relationships with kids. We could do so perhaps, because we were able to use ‘self’ and to be aware of a sexual dimension to ‘self’. It’s that awareness that allows us to get close enough to make a difference for kids.
Cheers guys!
