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“If I was [a government official] I would consider that people are not the same and even these homes cannot be the same. There are some good things and some bad things, but it is the children’s home and they are happy there.”
This reflection by the founder of an unregistered children’s home captures one of the key findings of the recently completed research into residential care for children in South Africa, conducted by the Children’s Institute in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria.
The study highlights the diversity within the residential care sector, pointing to a disjuncture between the conception of residential care underlying policy and law and the practice of residential care “on the ground”. Local and international policy position residential care as a temporary ‘last resort’, clearly distinct from family- and community-based care, or the ‘first resort’. The research questions the usefulness of this distinction, as in practice, a broad legal definition of residential care means that there is huge diversity in actual residential care provisioning.
Homes in the study varied dramatically along various dimensions including size, living arrangements, models of care, caregivers’ perceptions of both their role as well as the care settings’ relationship with their local communities. In some instances the residential care setting was in practice no different to a large household of kin, providing children with the opportunity for lasting relationships and the same everyday experiences within the local community as other neighbourhood children.
The completion of the research coincided with the final round of deliberations on the Children’s Amendment Bill, which provides for new legislation governing residential care. The findings from the research were fed into these final debates through written submissions and other advocacy work by the Children’s Institute.
Another finding of relevance for the Children’s Amendment Bill was a bias found in registration requirements which are often inflexibly applied regardless of local circumstances. The law and its implementation were found to favour the establishment of conventional institutions (that more closely approximate the ‘last resort’). This means that spontaneous local community responses frequently struggle to access registration – and therefore financial and other support from government. As one rural applicant, who was refused registration largely due to infrastructural requirements, bemoaned: “As for electricity in such a deep rural place; no one around here has got electricity. Does it now mean that because of our restrictions we should not help the children?” Pursuing registration often propels these settings towards care of a more stereotypically institutional nature, impacting on their more positive qualities, such as the degree of integration into community life.
The research report Home Truths: The phenomenon of residential care for children in a time of AIDS is available to order from the Children’s Institute.
For more information on this project contact Helen Meintjes or Sue Moses.
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