Beyond professional terms – the family metaphor in staff descriptions of their relations to young people in secure

One premise for the organisation of residential care for youth is that staff are expected to relate to each young person individually, but also to the group of young people as a whole. The relational interplay between staff and placed youths in secure unit care is fundamentally based on asymmetry, with interactions taking place in a context of confinement. The aim here is to explore how staff working in secure institutional care for youths in Sweden understand and describe their relationships with youth in terms that extend beyond professionalism, and especially their use of the family metaphor. Fifty-three interviews with staff were analysed in a two-step qualitative analysis, which generated three themes that highlighted staff narratives focusing on descriptions of parenting, sibling relationships, and closeness without using the family metaphor. One conclusion is that despite an overall shift away from the family metaphor, in the direction of framing residential care in professional terms, the family concept seems to sit quite well even in an environment with ambitions to provide professional care. The family metaphor may not be the cornerstone of care, but it is eminently present

Barnavårdens institutioner : framväxt, ideologi och struktur

The study presents an overview of the historical growth and deve-lopment of residential care for children and youth in Sweden as well as an analysis of the present-day structure and organisation. The empirical material consists of official statistics, government reports and data from a questionnaire addressed to all registered residential homes in the child welfare sector at the end of 1995. The history of residential care for children and youth is marked by a period of establishment and expansion in the first decades of the last century, followed by a process of major de-institutionalisa-tion in the period after the Second World War. A third phase was introduced with the Social Service Act of 1980, which laid down new premises for child welfare. Traditional concepts of children’s homes were replaced in the legislation by the “HVB-home” and the dividing line between institutions and foster homes became blurred. The study shows that contrary to what was intended, a growing part of out-of-home placements during the 1980:s and 1990:s where into residential care. In fact, residential care has taken over “market shares” from foster care in Sweden. Analysis of the range of alternatives shows that residential care today is relatively small-scale and that nearly all of the smaller units are privately run. Approximately half of the homes have teenagers as their target group and most homes work with longer-term pro-grammes of treatment and care. Educational background among staff varies considerably, but in general the level of educational is low. So far, no professional forces have proved strong enough to organise the field on a mutually knowledgeable, normative ground. A problem is the lack of unanimous concepts and a common language with a terminology that can be used for a systematic de-scription of the care or treatment given. What is clear, however, is that a new form of residential care can be identified – so-called hy-brid homes that are somewhere in between extended foster homes and small institutions – and that these homes have gained a con-siderable position in the field