The odyssey that is children’s care.

There is a rational reading of English post-1945 Residential Child Care. It is the legislation.

But those who have studied the history or compiled a literature review observe the context that led to the legislation is necessary to be included or the reasoning evaporates.

The rational pieces of legislation are glued by irrational fantasies. This then leads to the necessary next step to acknowledge, then study the irrational projections that serve to keep the concepts of ‘family’ and ‘community’ safe from scrutiny.

The residential sector has always carried the burden of society, families, and system. It is an insight that perhaps we cannot bear to know.

The residential sector is the holding container for the ills of families and a children’s social care system that seeks, and fails, to support families and protect children. This is inevitable in current circumstances given that the reasons for family dysfunction often is precipitated and then enhanced by poverty and deprivation, both not things a care system can solve, or even ameliorate.

So Family First/Enduring Relationships is pursuing its ideal. It is another chapter in the odyssey of children’s care. This time the hero is Josh MacAllister.

The Odyssey is a tale of evasions and half-truths.

Where is children’s social care’s Ithaca?

Ten years in another country, ten at sea. Then when Odysseus arrives at Ithaca he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is, he invents a stranger’s life story.

For a man who has spent 20 years trying to get home, Odysseus is remarkably reluctant to arrive. A script writer might see it as providing suspense.

At a deeper level Odysseus cannot tell his own story because, on some level, he cannot yet bear to know it. An insight that might be applied to children’s social care and the new legislation.

This begins to look like what we need to understand children’s social care is a classics scholar. Maybe Mary Beard, Natalie Haynes, Emily Wilson, Daniel Mendelsohn should form a consultancy?

Homer’s hero can be seen to experience shattered trust, numbness, and hypervigilance. He is (who wouldn’t be?)  traumatised.

But the poem (and legislation?) refuses to let him simply say so.

Modern trauma theory gives us a vocabulary that can illuminate something the Odyssey explores with remarkable precision, that trauma isn’t defined by the event itself, but by the impossibility of experiencing it fully at the time, which means it can’t be narrated directly afterwards either.

Instead, trauma returns sideways, through repetition, disguise, and fragmented forms of remembering, rather than as a clean account.

Applying this to the new legislation it becomes a structural performance of avoidance.

And there is the inescapable linking of those of us in children’s social care, systemically including ministers, often find ourselves in structures, systems, situations, settings, that are a recreation of our past trauma. We are drawn to the possibility of resolving what happened or at least getting a further insight. Hence repetitive tweaking of legislation (think regional care coops) seeking to put wrongs right but as it is more of the same, actually makes things wronger.

Odysseus builds alternative selves avoiding responsibility rather than inhabiting the one who caused, permitted or failed to prevent something that violated his own values.

Seen this way, Odysseus delayed arrival isn’t primarily hiding from Ithaca. He’s hiding from having to say, out loud, what he did and failed to do (at Troy).

Is the new legislation yet another retelling of the story that would let a survivor (any of us) be fully known again, yet often proves the one thing he cannot?