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AUSTRALIAN VIEW
As if children mattered
A few months ago I attended the funeral of three young
Aboriginal boys, the oldest of whom was 11. They were killed on Saturday
March 11 while walking on railway tracks in a suburb south west of
Brisbane. I attended because the children and their families have had
some association with our Pathways to Prevention program, a partnership
between Griffith University and the national community organisation
Mission Australia. Our work is located in a disadvantaged area not too
far from where the tragedy occurred. Pathways aims to promote both child
and community development through child-focused programs, family
empowerment, and through building stronger connections between families,
children and local schools .
Our project philosophy is very much in line with a
10-point national plan for early childhood released on August 21 this
year by a group of 21 experts from a range of disciplines. The
recommendations of this group include prioritising the wellbeing of
children, universal preschool education for children in the two years
prior to school, and a living wage payment that allows primary carers to
take at least a year to care for infants and young children. In this
paper I want to reflect on the policy landscape around early childhood,
families and schools, draw on what we have learned in our work in the
Pathways Project, and propose a specific tool for extending the
early-years initiatives to support the development of children
throughout the primary years and beyond. However the funeral remains for
me a vivid reminder of the formidable challenges we face, no matter what
age group we focus on.
More than one thousand people, mostly from the
Indigenous community, attended the funeral, sharing their memories of
the boys and offering their love and support to the families. The
tragedy was intensified for one of the families because just eight weeks
previously they had lost an older boy in a high-speed police pursuit. He
had been a passenger in a stolen car that crashed when the young driver
lost control.
The stories that emerged about the lives of the
children brought home to me the relentless challenge of poverty and
social exclusion in this country. The stories made real the statistics
for this nation that show that since World War II many aspects of health
and wellbeing haven’t got better for children and young people, despite
the longest economic boom in history. On the contrary, many indicators
show substantial deterioration in health and wellbeing, especially for
our Indigenous brothers and sisters.
The stories also underlined for me the way problems in
the domains of education, health, family life, economic activity,
community, work, and criminal justice are intertwined. For example one
of the boys spent his early years in what is probably the most socially
deprived suburb in Brisbane, was excluded from school by Grade 2 and
became, in the words of the eulogy, “a Primary School Dropout”. This was
despite the efforts and obvious love of his two parents and extended
family. Toward the end of his short life, at age 9, this lad was roaming
the streets and the city, emulating the behaviour of older boys,
notwithstanding their admonitions “to always be a good boy and that it
was no good doing the things they did”.
Tragically, one aspect of the funeral was an enacted
parable, illustrating this point about the connectedness of problems. As
the church bells tolled and the hearses began to pull out for the
cemetery, five heavily armoured vans emerged from the rear, from the car
park, setting out for their journeys back to the prisons and detention
centres from which several older siblings and cousins had been released
temporarily for the service. I have to say that for me the starkness of
the parable was almost more than I could bear: it was almost as if for
Indigenous children there are two inevitable destinations, the prison or
the cemetery, each pathway through life being littered with the wreckage
of a school career.
Despite all the love with which these three boys were
surrounded, it has to be recognised that on that fateful afternoon a few
months ago they were in a perilous situation and were too young (or
perhaps too cocky) to understand the risks. And no responsible adult was
there at the time to look out for them. Family and community supports
sometimes fail even in the most privileged social settings. Where
poverty and social exclusion are entrenched, failure of support systems
is a more common phenomenon. That’s why the state has a responsibility,
and indeed why the whole community has a profound moral obligation to
“look out” for vulnerable children like the three boys who were killed,
as well as for all children and young people who will from time to time
encounter challenges beyond the normal capacities of families to
overcome.
Something close to a national consensus has developed
recently around the need to address the effects of social inequality
through interventions that focus on the early years (0-5), with all
state governments and the Commonwealth now committing substantial
resources. The most prominent example is the nationwide Communities for
Children program . Yet ten years ago, the idea of early intervention was
largely absent from Australian policy discourse. What brought about
change were the long-term evaluations of overseas interventions, the
publication locally of reports like Pathways to Prevention:
Developmental and Early Intervention Approaches to Crime in Australia
which I authored with a group of colleagues , and the formation of major
lobbies such as the National Initiative for the Early Years and the
Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. The national
10-point plan for early childhood I referred to earlier is the latest
contribution to this policy push.
However, what is now needed is an extension of the
principles underpinning the early-years policies to school-aged children
and beyond, into early adulthood, and a concomitant refocusing on the
school system. We are currently building on what was learned from the
Pathways to Prevention program, which began with a focus on the early
years and the transition to school, to address this larger challenge. A
principle that is guiding our thinking is a “preposterous proposition”
for public policy that the great American developmental psychologist
Urie Bronfenbrenner enunciated 25 years ago: Create formal support
systems that generate and strengthen informal support systems, that in
turn reduce the need for formal systems .
While we can document many successes through the
Pathways Project, including measurable improvements in behaviour amongst
boys who participated in the preschool program and whose parents
participated in the family independence program, we continue to face
significant challenges in terms of bridging the huge divide between
families and schools, and in setting up systems that will allow schools,
families and the helping agencies to work effectively together to
promote better outcomes for children.
We have called a new approach that we are in the
process of piloting Circles of Care. Circles of Care is a program
designed primarily to address the imbalance of power between
disadvantaged families and schools. We aim to create within schools a
supportive community that “is there” for the child throughout their
primary school career, and which can provide ongoing support,
encouragement and advocacy. A child’s circle of care would support
positive development and help to reduce the risks of conflict between
the child and the school.
Acknowledgements of the child’s achievements would be
shared within the circle, and form an alternative to the parent-teacher
interviews that are often poorly attended and which are stressful for
those parents and teachers involved. Effectively the program creates a
“conspiracy of care” that celebrates successes and provides a small
community - including but “extending” the family - that looks out for
the interests of the child and heads off difficulties before they occur.
How would Circles of Care be constituted? We envisage
a small group consisting of the child’s teacher, the parents or
caregivers, an uncle or other relative, perhaps an older sibling, a
Pathways worker, and perhaps a learning support teacher or someone else
from the school (such as a teacher aide who speaks the family’s
language). This small group could call on other relevant people and
agencies as needed.
This is a challenging project, but it is exactly in
the spirit of Bronfenbrenner and his emphasis on creating formal or
organised systems that create the conditions in which informal and
community supports can flourish, ultimately – one would hope – making
special schools and behaviour management systems less necessary. The
idea builds on the developmental and restorative literatures, and
addresses critical deficiencies in current systems.
In the end the challenge we face in this country is to
care enough to establish new ways of seeing and acting, to move outside
of established systems that seem incapable of solving the kinds of
“wicked problems” that lead to tragedy and heartache. It’s about opening
doors for children who can’t open them for themselves.
Ross Homel is Professor of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at Griffith University
15 September 2006
http://www.newmatilda.com/policytoolkit/policydetail.asp?PolicyID=506
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