Therapeutic Living with Other People’s Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care, c.1930 - c.1990
An integrated oral history, archive, Internet-based, and person-to-person approach to gathering, preserving and sharing a neglected aspect of the nation's industrial, cultural and social heritage.
This is a project which is to be led and guided by former children and young people from residential therapeutic environments. It will involve them, together with former staff, family and friends, as interviewees, as interviewers, and to help carry the project forward generally.
1. The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study
Centre is the only archive facility in Britain devoted to gathering,
protecting, and making available the national heritage related to
residential therapeutic environments for children and young people.
3. The project will concentrate its attention on the period from the early 1940s, when the national evacuation scheme led to the creation of a new generation of experimental therapeutic hostels for difficult-to-billet children across Britain, to the early 1980s, by which time most of the early pioneering figures had either died or retired and many of the pioneering institutions had closed or changed nature and direction. Those institutions which retained their pioneering roots and ethos had either begun or were about to begin a rapid adaptation to meet the radical demands and challenges of new social, economic, and cultural conditions, which included new and rapidly changing legislation and regulation, and the changing public perception of childhood, vulnerable children, and the residential approach to working with them.
4. Although largely unacknowledged, many of these changes were a consequence of the contribution which therapeutic residential environments made during this formative forty year period in the history of the nation\'s relationship and response to vulnerable, disturbed and delinquent children. During this period workers for children in therapeutic community environments forged a new body of professional knowledge and understanding, established new organisations, shaped and informed new legislation, and fundamentally helped to change the nation's approach to child care practice and training. Much that is common sense and even part of legislation today was trialled and proven in residential therapeutic environments then; and much that was common sense at the time was shown to be inadequate for the task in hand, and in some cases actively damaging.
5. This is an immensely influential and fundamentally important area of the nation's heritage, but it mirrors, in relation to the national heritage, the marginalisation and social exclusion often suffered by the children and young people themselves. It is characterised by the invisibility, by the inaccessibility, and by the destruction and loss of records, of memory, and of objects of memory relating to the children and the places and people who looked after them, as well as of the wider work itself. It has, in a sense, fallen out of the national heritage.
6. This absence, loss and destruction of memory and heritage is reflected in the lives and memories of many of those children and young people themselves, who, as adults - and however creative and productive their lives may have become - retain a part of themselves which does not belong to the mainstream community around them, or have a safe and valued place in the wider heritage. In the absence of memory by, about, and for them, their personal histories remain hidden, or protected, or simply unspoken, unknown and unarticulated; but in any event detached from the mainstream history and heritage of the community.
7. It goes beyond this, however, and here the project can play a particular role. For many former children and young people the loss, invisibility, and inaccessibility of records about them, of people who remember them, and of significant places in which they lived, translates into a corresponding lack of personal foundation and certainty about themselves and who they are. In the absence of being remembered, and enjoying an ongoing dialogue with familiar objects, places and people from key stages in childhood, they have a lack, to some degree and at some level, of a coherent and connected understanding of their own place within the scheme of things, or even a firm understanding and knowledge that they have such a place. Once again, through lack of certainty and belief in their own personal heritage and its value, and the ability or opportunity to experience, articulate and share it, they are effectively excluded and estranged from full and confident membership in the heritage of the nation as a whole; and whatever they may have given back in their lives, it remains difficult for them to feel entirely as if they belong, and as if the riches of the nation's heritage truly belong to them as they do to others.
8. As currently conceived, the core project will cover three years, and involve a full-time oral historian, a full time archivist/support officer, and a full-time digital and web environment officer, with the support of current Planned Environment Therapy Trust staff, as well as volunteers.
9. Alongside new and innovative use of Internet resources, we will be seeking other creative and effective ways to share more widely the heritage which the project gathers. One suggestion has been to arrange visits of former children – men and women with a long experience of life beyond the therapeutic environment – to current therapeutic environments, to share if appropriate their experiences and memories with current staff and children. Another has been to create a theatre piece or pieces, which could be taken to current therapeutic environments and other accessible performance venues. Another would be a computer-based travelling exhibition, which could go into current therapeutic environments, for use and input by staff and children. Solutions to communication is one of the functions of the project.