Abstract
Stigma devalues, discriminates, and magnifies social inequalities. For children in care, who have far worse educational outcomes than children who are not in care, stigma negatively effects the others’ perceptions, as well as the children’s perceptions of themselves. This paper is drawn from a larger research project which considered the ways in which school leaders supported children in care in their schools and the barriers they experienced in doing so. Engaging with the interviews of school leaders and drawing on poststructural theory, I critically explore schooling discourses related to being in care and how these in/form the subjectivities of children in care. The analysis illustrates how being in care inscribes discourses of deficiency, erasure, and vulnerability, and as a stigmatized identity marker enacts inequalities and exclusions by and within school. The discourses related to being in care magnify children’s precarity, determining certain norms of recognition including who cannot be—or are not allowed to be—seen as student-subjects.
We’ve really worked to shift that from “those” to “our” kids. …There may be some of that mentality of “these” kids, problem kids—they’re often some of the kids in care, so they might be stigmatized by our… within our school. That can happen. (Adam, Principal)
Etymologically speaking, the term stigma is a Latin term that originated in the 14th century and meant, “mark made on skin by burning with a hot iron.” The Greek meaning was “to brand” and came from the root word steig, meaning, “to stick” (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). Erving Goffman (2009/1963), a prominent sociologist and author of the influential text, Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity, moved the idea of stigma from physical branding or bodily markings, to that of a sense of disgrace that does not require fleshly evidence. In so doing, he identified two aspects of stigma: difference and devaluation. Since then, sociologists recognize that stigmatization involves labeling, stereotyping, othering, and discriminating and have attempted to understand stigma regarding social inequalities (Clair, 2018; Link and Phelan, 2001). Whereas sociologists consider the social processes and effects of stigma, psychologists seek to understand individual experiences of stigma and to develop approaches that might mitigate its negative effects. For example, Dansey et al. (2019) consider the impact of stigmatization on youth in care and describe various clinical implications and treatments for feelings of stigma, identifying ways to support children in improving their resilience and recover from the difficulty they experience.
This engagement with stigma is different in that it moves considerations of stigma away from individual attitudes, responses, and experiences, and instead aims to consider and trace the discursive movements of stigma and how these discourses act upon and enact particular identities. 1 In other words, I aim to consider the ways in which discourses related to being in care circulate in schools through policies and practices meant to support children in care, and paradoxically, constitute stigma in/on the identities of children in care. Drawn from a larger research project, I draw on empirical data and theoretical insights to consider the ways in which discourses related to being in care produce and reify particular identities of/for children in care that are stigmatizing. In Manitoba (the province in which this study takes place) being in care is complicated by factors of racism and colonization, due to the overrepresentation of Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) children in the child welfare system. In this paper, I will focus on the ways in which being in care ultimately inscribes discourses of deficiency, erasure, and vulnerability. Being in care becomes a stigmatized identity marker and enacts inequalities and exclusions by and within school. The discourses related to being in care magnify these children’s precarity (Butler, 2004), determining certain norms of recognition, including who cannot be—or are not allowed to be—seen as student-subjects.
Context
Children are often—and already—socially constructed as weak and inferior compared to adults, or as Cannella (1999: 36) describes, children are the “the ultimate ‘Other’.” Children are often considered to be lesser than adults, or to be not fully developed adults and thus, maintain a diminished status in society. Moreover, the constructs of children and childhood have traditionally been constituted through Eurocentric norms and practices, centering dominant groups meaning that some children are further marginalized and dehumanized through racism and colonization (Souto-Manning et al., 2018). As Alexandra (2016: 397) has articulated, “in Canada, colonialism has shaped and continues to shape the life chances of Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people in vastly different ways.” It is in this way, through the oppressive discourses of racism and the historic and contemporary practices of colonization, that the constructs of children and childhood intersect with racial and colonial norms and practices. Materially, this manifests in children in care experiencing the poorest educational and social outcomes (Lund and Stokes, 2020) than other children, while recognizing that their experiences of poverty, abuse, neglect, and marginalization cannot be untangled from historic and contemporary policies and practices of colonialism and racism.
We see these poor outcomes for children in care realized in the research. For example, the noteworthy findings of the “Brownell report” (Brownell et al., 2015) found that, in Manitoba children in care are significantly less likely to graduate from high school, advance to post-secondary education and experience behavioral difficulties that impact their academic progress. As of March 2017, Manitoba Child and Family Services (CFS) reported 11,352 children in care in the province, the largest rates in Canada, and shamefully, one of the highest rates of children in care the world (Wall-Wieler et al., 2018). Moreover, although Manitoba’s population is comprised of about 11% Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, or Inuit) peoples, a staggeringly disproportionate 89% of the children in care are Indigenous (Brownell et al., 2015). While these statistics are important to foreground and illustrate alarming systemic failures, they also reiterate a narrative of “achievement gaps” and “under-performance” of Indigenous students. These narratives—while statistically “true”—risk framing the problem as a failure of children and their conditions, rather than pointing to the historical and contemporary colonial and racist systems that frame and cultivate these problems in the first place. The institutions, policies, and practices of education and of child welfare in Canada have long been an exclusionary, racist, and violent systems—colonial projects intended to oppress and exclude particular children. It is from this assumption—that the identities and experiences of children in care are framed by racist and colonial practices which have manifest in abhorrent outcomes and experiences for these children—that I position this research. It is also of note that children in care have numerous and varying factors of identity—the intersecting identity markers that shape their various individual experiences of oppression, including race, class, ability, and so on. And although particular to this context is the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care (which invokes related issues of racism and colonialism), the aim of this paper is not to attempt to de-tangle and account for the various factors of oppression, but rather to consider discourses of being in care in particular and to consider how this factor of identity constitutes and affects children’s—often already—marginalized experiences of schooling.
In response to these large numbers of children in care and in efforts to better support children in care in their schools, the school district in which this study took place established an interprofessional committee comprised of vested school district personnel (including the student services assistant superintendent, school principals, vice-principals, and teachers), as well as representatives from the various child welfare agencies. Through anecdotal conversations, teachers told us that these large numbers of children in care have resulted in some classrooms having two, three, or more children in care in already-diverse classroom settings. The diversity of classrooms was reflected in more than 40 languages spoken by this school division’s families, for example, as well as by the large numbers of children who were in care: 5% of the district’s population and 10% of some schools’ populations were comprised of children in care.
Our research team developed a partnership research project in which we sought to explore the inter-relational dimensions of the child welfare and education systems in order to improve educational equity for children in care. In the phase of the study that informs this analysis, school leaders were interviewed in order to elicit the strategies they employed and barriers they encountered in supporting children in care in their schools. 2 Although the school leaders can be (and should be) lauded for their efforts, commitment, and tenacity, the inequities faced by the marginalized group of children in care cannot be resolved by individual efforts alone (Janzen et al., 2020). As Butler (2004: 15) notes, “We need to situate individual responsibility in light of its collective conditions.” Therefore, in this analysis, I consider these collective conditions through the discourses that circulate, constitute, and manifest in the stigmatization of children and youth in care, and illustrate the ways in which discourses related to being in care produce and maintain inequities for children in care.
Children in care and stigmatization
Because of the racist and colonial policies regarding children in care and Canada’s decades-long practices of removing Indigenous children from their homes, it is not surprising that children in care experience educational and social exclusion. It is well evidenced that the educational exclusion children in care experience manifests in high dropout rates, low graduation rates, low academic achievement, segregation from mainstream programs, and lower participation in post-secondary education than their peers (Brownell et al., 2015; Fernandez, 2008; Lund and Stokes, 2020; Pecora, 2012; Rutman and Hubberstey, 2018; Sebba et al., 2015). After leaving school, social exclusion is experienced by children in care in the form of high rates of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and involvement in criminal justice (Courtney et al., 2018; Ridge and Millar, 2000). Moreover, as Ferguson and Wolkow (2012) point out, poor educational outcomes and high rates of school failure for children in care date back to the 1970s. This is not a new problem.
Given that children in care experience social and educational exclusion, it is not surprising that they sometimes report feeling stigmatized. Stigmatization affects how children and youth in care view themselves, as well as how others view them, a nasty chicken-and-egg cycle of shame and judgment. In other words, stigma creates a perception that children in care are different and not normal (Jones et al., 2020; Ridge and Millar, 2000; Rogers, 2017), which negatively impacts children in care because of the damaging effects of this internalized oppression (Dansey et al., 2019; Rogers, 2017).
It appears that the rules and processes surrounding children in care generate stigma and social differences (Ridge and Millar, 2000). In part, this is due to ways in which their lives are “professionalized,” meaning that children in care are part of “highly formalised protocols and procedures in place that marked them out as Other” (Jones et al., 2020: 9). According to Jones et al., the extensive meetings, additional forms, and bureaucratic processes that surround children in care institutional and corporatize what for other students would simply be parenting, subsequently distancing them from their peers. These processes affect how children in care are perceived by others and perceive themselves. Numerous studies demonstrate that children in care seem “painfully aware of the negative perceptions others had of them including social workers, teachers, and peers” (Ferguson and Wolkow, 2012: 1146). Specifically, sometimes students felt as though the teachers did not understand the elements of and challenges associated with being in care (Townsend et al., 2020); that they experienced a sense of lowered expectations by teachers (Ferguson and Wolkow, 2012); that they were treated differently by teachers and adults (Jones et al., 2020); or that there was something wrong with them and with their families. Sadly, for children in care, their peer relationships are also fraught with stigma. Because children in care experience greater transiency, they had a more difficult time sustaining peer relationships (Ridge and Millar, 2000). Being in care hinders the development and sustainability of peer relationships and social networks formed in school, making youth feel as though they were “different.” Research has illustrated how children in care are often bullied and insulted, making them vulnerable to social exclusion (Dansey et al., 2018; Ridge and Millar, 2000; Rogers, 2017).
Because students were aware of and feared the stigma associated with being identified as in care, they also expressed wanting to be treated the same, or as “normal” (Jackson et al., 2020; Jones et al., 2020; Ridge and Millar, 2000; Rogers, 2017). In attempts to “refuse the label,” youth often engaged in what Jones at al. (2020) called “strategic identity management,” in which students would attempt to hide their status of being in care (Dansey et al., 2018, 2019; Ferguson and Wolkow, 2012; Fernandez, 2008; Jones et al., 2020). As students “actively managed their spoiled identity” (Rogers, 2017: 1088), they attempted to control how and when to the disclose their in-care status to peers. Importantly, the effects of the stigmatization that children in care experience, in the othering and exclusionary processes (Jones et al., 2020), can be damaging in its internalized oppression (Dansey et al., 2019; Rogers, 2017) and acts “as a powerful form of ‘symbolic violence’” (Jones et al., 2020: 3). The stigma and associate desire for secrecy about students’ status of being in care is damaging for young people and acts as a barrier for children in their attempts to access social capital (Smith et al., 2015).
In responding to the stigmatization of children in care, there are numerous strategies identified in the literature that involve clinical treatments aimed at supporting children’s capacity to develop resilience, to tolerate difficult experiences, and to develop supportive relationships (Dansey et al., 2019; Ferguson and Wolkow, 2012; Matheson, 2019; Rutman and Huberstey, 2018). While it is important to support children in care and respond to their experiences of stigma, I am concerned about approaches to stigmatization that orient the problem as originating in the child and as a problem of the child, remedied by interventions on the child. Instead, I want to shift attention about the stigmatization of children in care away from understandings and practices that pathologize children. I want to consider the discursive movements that enliven stigma, in order to consider the ways in which discourses related to being in care constitute experiences of stigma in the first place.
Theoretical and analytical perspectives
This study draws on theories and epistemologies of poststructuralism, allowing for critical considerations of policy and what it does, enlivening notions of language, discourse, power, and subjectivities. Poststructural theory is an epistemological, analytical, and political tool that helps to critically examine normalized assumptions and structural inequities. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others, I consider the experiences of the participants alongside and through discourses in order to better understand and articulate the ways in which discourses move, with what effects, and on whom. Poststructural theory considers truth as subjective, language as unreliable in conveying meaning, and identities (or subjectivities) as fluid. In rejecting truth and certainty, poststructuralism is interested in the relationship workings of power and how power operates discursively to constitute knowledge and identities (Weedon, 1987).
Poststructural theory presupposes that language, power, and knowledge operate through discourses. Discourse is understood as language, texts, signs, artefacts, and images that circulate to constitute and construct knowledge and identities. As Foucault (1971/2010: 49) articulated, discourses are the “practices that systematically form the objects which they speak.” Through the workings of power, language, and discourses, subjects are constituted; “a kind of power that not only unilaterally acts on a given individual as a form of domination, but also activates or forms the subject” (Butler, 1997: 84). Importantly, it is through the production of ideas, that discourses also “regulate the world” (Youdell, 2006: 35). Exploring the relationships between knowledge and power help to reveal the ways in which certain discourses become normalized, while excluding or minimizing other ways of knowing or being.
As Foucault (1976/1990) argued, the subject is formed by the norms that precede and exceed the subject, shaping the subject according to discursive norms and practices. These discursive norms then, not only form subjectivities in particular ways, they also determine who will and who will not be a subject (Butler, 2005). As Butler (2005: 22), explains, “what I can ‘be’, is constrained in advance by a regime of truth that decides what will and will not be a recognizable form of being.” These regimes of truth become the basis for recognizability, who the subject will be, can be, and can become—thereby also determining who will not recognizable. In the context of education, the regimes of truth enact operations of social and political power, circulating through discourses of schooling and producing normative ideals of the “student,” producing certain student-subjects as more recognizable than others (Butler, 2010).
Influenced by Foucault and others, reconceptualist curriculum scholars have challenged naturalized and often sedimented assumptions and identities of children. Reconceptualist curriculum scholars have challenged Enlightenment and modernist assumptions of a universalized experience of children and childhood, which has been typically dependent on an adult/child dichotomy, a linear and developmental progress of functioning, and subsequently, a prevailing assumption that children are lesser than adults. Such modernist conceptions of childhood have “legitimized the surveillance, measurement and social control of children and other marginalized groups” (Cannella, 1999: 63). Such a conceptualization of children and childhood has long been challenged by reconceptualist scholars (see for example, Bloch, 1992; Cannella, 1999; Dahlberg et al., 2007; Lesko, 1996) who have endeavored to interrogate power relations and social regulations that control children through dominant discourses (Curry and Cannella, 2013). Poststructural theorists (as well as feminist, postcolonial, critical, and others) strive to disrupt dominant discourses of children and childhood that objectify and oppress children through romantic notions of children’s innocence and the concomitant narrative of their need for protection (Garlen, 2019). Reconceptualist understandings of children value multiplicity, diversity, and agency of children and childhood and recognize children as active co-constructors of knowledge, identity, and culture (Dahlberg et al., 2007). Such conceptions seek to challenge unequal power relations and practices that engage in surveillance, pathologization, and the subsequent devaluation of children.
In exploring the experiences of educators working with children in care in their schools, I sought to consider the everyday, normalizing practices that circulate through discourses—the language, events, policies, and procedures—and how these discourses move and to what end. This study critically considers the particular identity markers (in this case, being in care) and subsequent educational experiences or outcomes (such as not doing well in school), in order to challenge this seemingly inevitable or inextricable relationships. This analysis aims to foreground the relationship between identity and outcomes “are the result of discriminatory practices whether these are explicit or intentional or not” (Youdell, 2006). I hope to illustrate how “being in care” is an identity marker that mobilizes discourses that invoke unequal and inequitable educational opportunities for those children, despite policies, procedures, or individual efforts that aim to support children in care and/or ameliorate these differences. In drawing on poststructural theory and reconceptualist perspectives of children, I critically consider how particular conditions of schooling—circulating in/through discourses—in/form particular subjectivities so that we might “rethink the relation between condition and acts” (Butler, 2005: 16), and thus re/consider our responsibilities between these.
Mode of Inquiry
Through engagements in the larger research project, and through conversations with school leaders (including principals and teachers) in the school district, there was a need to better understand the ways in which school leaders worked to support children in care in their schools. To that end, I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with school leaders, specifically principals and teachers who self-identified as having an active interest in supporting children and youth in care in their schools. The 14 participants worked in four different schools (kindergarten to grade 12) and described the ways in which they supported children in care and the barriers they encountered in attempting to do so. The interviews were conducted individually and in pairs (depending on the participants’ requests) and ranged from 45 minutes to about two hours in length. Participants were asked about their experiences supporting children in care in their schools, the initiatives they enacted, the strategies they implemented, the challenges they faced, and stories of successes and failures. In their responses, they were prompted to provide illustrative examples when possible. The interviews were usually rich in detail and often conveyed emotional experiences of frustration and despair, alongside stories of perseverance and hope.
The interviews were transcribed and then analyzed using thematic content analysis. First transcripts were read, memoed, and coded inductively for initial themes, then the codes were reviewed and sorted into main themes. Working iteratively between the data, the codes, and the numerous themes, themes and subthemes were (tentatively) settled on and defined. The data were then revisited again and read against in light of the revised list of codes. The final coding process focused on the theme of stigma, which informs this paper.
From where does stigma originate?
Although they were never asked directly about stigma, the participants often spoke about it, sharing their perceptions of stigma as experienced by children in care and how stigma acted as a barrier for children in their schooling experiences. Take for example how Samson explained it: Stigmatization, for some. And that is something that we have been reflecting upon and trying to figure out how to remove stigmatization but also build up those individual student’s pride …And so, it’s about removing any negative nomenclature to being in care.
Here we can see how stigma operates in at least two ways. The first is the ways in which the school leaders were sensitive to the fact that children (might) feel stigmatized by being in care. As Jason explained, “One thing you don’t want—them to feel ostracized as well, and yet you want them to feel like there’s a way that they can be … develop some connection and support … So, it’s a tricky thing to navigate.” Mark, a high school principal, explained how he got “caught” trying to navigate these “tricky” situations when kids are in care. He said, “I made the comment [to the new student], ‘I’d like to introduce you to this teacher who supports students in care’. Mistake! …They didn’t want to be associated with that. ‘No, I’m good. Leave me out of that, altogether’.” In these examples, we can see how concerns about stigma arose in the interviews and the participants’ consciousness about students’ feelings of stigmatization and their efforts to minimize students’ sense that their identity as a kid in care could lead to being “ostracized.”
The second way that stigma operates is in the ways that others attach stigma to children in care. Adam explained this by saying: there may be some of that mentality in these kids, problem kids, they’re often some of these kids in care, so they might be stigmatized by our… within our school, that can happen. Usually there is some, something’s happened that’s legit concern, but it doesn’t take much and [snaps his fingers], it’s like, “Oh it’s one of those kids.”
Adam further explained that the teachers sometimes assumed that some students’ negative behavior was a factor of being in care, which created a stigma or an association for some teachers that being in care meant students would be poorly behaved.
The school leaders were conscious that for children and youth in care, the stigma was experienced both as a sense of shame by the children and as being shamed by those around them—a discursive (and undoubtedly, emotional) experience moving within and on the students, constituting and constraining identities. As Butler (1999: 601) explains, “the body is a site where regimes of discourses and power inscribe themselves.” Explore the regimes of discourses in order to consider how the body become (re)inscribed is useful in better understanding and interrupting discourses that are stigmatizing. As Jason instructs, “It’s a tricky thing to navigate yet I don’t want to ignore it.” It is tricky, to be sure. What does it mean to “navigate” stigma? From where does stigma originate and how does it move? And importantly, how do the discourses that circulate around children in care re/inscribe particular identities as stigmatized?
Inscribing deficiency
The education system has long reflected instrumentalist approaches to teaching, magnified in this neoliberal era of managerialism and accountability (Janzen, 2020). The participants often shared observation and stories about the ways in which students who were in care were often described through lenses of deficit. These students’ “lack” or “need” was typically related to how supports for the students were allocated in education and child welfare systems. Consider how Linda, a principal with previous experience as a support teacher, described her observations of this dynamic: Well, I think the first thing is the mindset, and that when we are talking with a Social Worker, we are not just like, “What’s wrong with this child?” because that actually can be--. If they’re really trying to hold onto a level of funding for a child in care, they may come into a meeting with the school trying to present them in this really sort of deficit way.
Linda was aggravated by the ways in which children were often described through deficit- and deviant-oriented descriptions. Children in care who were determined to have a greater amount of need (as determined by identifying pathologized behaviors, and/or cognitive, social, and emotional deficits) could be eligible for additional supports. These supports might manifest in the assignment of an additional educational assistant or the provision of resources (such as respite care) for foster families. Subsequently, those who work with children in care, in an effort to seek and provide greater supports for them, are subjected to consider the child in terms of need and of deficit, so that a case can be made for system-provided responses to such deficit. Although the province has discontinued the use of application-based funding for individual children (except for the most behaviorally challenged students who could be eligible for additional individual funding under the “level 3” category of “emotionally behaviourally disturbed” [EBD]). Yet, we can see the persistence of needs-based discourses and how these necessitate that children be construct via deficiency/ies, thereby constituting a requirement of both a diagnosis (e.g., EBD) and a treatment (i.e., additional supports) (Janzen, 2019). Of course, those working with children in care should attempt to secure the best level of support and care for the children in their charge. Moreover, some children in care may indeed have additional needs that warrant additional supports. However, what I am to illustrate here is the ways in which the discourses of need constitute children in care as implicitly deficient. My focus is not necessarily on individuals, per se, but rather on the ways in which the systems inscribe and project particular assumptions about particular identity markers.
This deficit approach to describing and understanding children, was described by Bernice as something that has “always bothered me.” Bernice, who was also a school principal and had extensive previous experience with the district’s student support services. She described one of her experiences as: We’re in an intake meeting, foster parents can talk about a child and say things that they would never say if that was their biological child, and that has always bothered me….There were so many times I wanted to stop a meeting and say, “If that were your biological child, would you be saying that?” And that we also know that the system is set up that the higher the needs of the kid, the more money you get.
Thus, the policies and practices that aim to enhance services become translated and enacted discursively, constituting children’s identities through discourses of deficiencies and sometimes deviancy, requiring foster families, social workers, and school personnel to think of, observe and describe students through lenses of deficit and disorder. In these scenarios, the policies and practices that determine additional funding and resources get enacted materially through registration forms (where students must be identified as being in care), intake meetings (where educators, social workers, foster families, and experts detail the student’s deficits in order to determine supports), and subsequent observations (where students are closely monitored for deviance in order to access funding, resources such as therapy, and additional human resources). As Ball et al. (2011: 620) explain, the policies of funding get translated as “an iterative process of making texts and putting texts into action, literally ‘enacting’ policy.” In this way, policies that aim to provide resources for children in care become enacted materially through practices, discursively re/constituting children’s identity as those of need. When school supports and resources require a demonstration of need, this “need” “reinforce[s] concepts of deficit and disadvantage” (Thomas and Loxely, 2007: 48).
Thus, the discursive effects of policies and practices become enacted by an assemblage of people (Ball et al., 2012) —social workers, foster families, and teachers—motivated to seek and document deficiency in the child. Theoretically speaking these discourses are enacted in support the child, but paradoxically, they reconstitute the child in terms of “lack.” The label of being in care then, is (inadvertently and paradoxically) beneficial to those who are charged with caring for the child, while at the same time, the labeling of being in care requires an identification of deficiencies in order to get supports. As Youdell (2006) asserts, “it is the very act of designation that constitutes the subject” (p. 36). Therefore, the label of being in care enlivens discourses that construct the child as an object of need, constituting the subject as always already deficient, reverberating through language and practices that objectify and pathologize students, re/constitute the identity of the child in care with the stigma of always and already being broken.
Inscribing Erasure
Most of the participants expressed frustration with a particular policy regarding media consent which is entwined with policies related to privacy of information. Of concern is not the policy per se, but its enactment; the way in which circumstances are created (Ball et al., 2012). Policy as an enactment is a way of understanding policy as “interpreted and translated and reconstructed and remade” (Ball et al., 2012: 6); a compilation of dynamic and complex processes that are “peopled” and produce various roles and actors. The district’s “publication authorization form” is a release intended to be signed by the parent or guardian granting permission to the district to share a student’s “work samples, achievements, pictures, and videos public” in a variety of forums, including in educational workshops, classes, conferences, and on school and/or district websites. The form must be signed by the legal guardian whom, for children in care, is the social worker. As a matter of practice, according to the participants, social workers do not sign these releases due to perceived or potential child protection issues. This means that in some cases, the location of children in care needed to be kept confidential, and that by “publishing” children’s images or artworks, their location could become known publicly and could put the child’s safety at risk. Although the intention of this policy has the child’s best interest (i.e., protection of their identity and location) at its core, its enactment seems to have unintended and even dire consequences.
Diane, a learning support teacher at an early years school, explained some of these consequences. Diane described a school event at which the children in all classrooms were going to be performing in the school gym for families. In an attempt to include the kindergarten classroom, the kindergarten teacher wanted to video record her children in advance, allowing the students to feel more comfortable and ensuring high quality sound for the audience. However, because that classroom included a number of children in care, and because the children’s social workers had not signed the media release form, the students in care could not be included in the video production. Diane explained the scenario: The biggest issue that gets in the way is publication of kids’ work and having their voices included in anything that might be remotely publicly shared. So, an example of that is we have a literacy night coming up next week, and classrooms are presenting different things depending on what they’re working on. …They [children in care] have no permission to share anything. So their voices can’t be included….If they could be here in person and speak in front of an audience, they could, but with the kindergarten kids we were looking to record them in a quiet space and have that video playing and then that becomes a video artifact and we don’t have permission to do that.
Understandably, the social workers’ perspective—and responsibility—is that of protecting the child. However, the full extent of the enactments of the media release policy and the effects on children in care are more complex. These complexities become evident in Diane’s explanation: [The media release policy] really restricts any sort of sharing of any kind of performance …. So, when the choir goes to the legislative building to sing, well those kids have to be off to the side so they are not in the picture when they take it for the newsletter. It becomes a real stigma.
Although participants understood the rationale for such decisions in theory—and I am not disputing the rationale of such protections—what needs to be considered is the inadvertent consequences on students’ sense of identity and subjectivities. For example, participants explained the ways in which teachers would blur the faces of children in photographs or use digital stickers to cover a child’s face or only show the backs of their heads. Heather described her experience: “When I took the picture for the front cover [of the book we made], I had to do it so that we couldn’t their faces. So, it’s all of the backs of their heads and that bothered them! [They said], ‘Why can’t we show our faces?’”
In enacting the policy, children are excluded, blurred, erased, or placed on the fringes of the photo. Meanwhile, other participants resented—and even resisted enacting—the policy, recognizing the ways in which the policy stigmatized children in care. For example, Linda, a school principal, saw this policy as an injustice and expressed her disapproval: Talk about a way to just instantly, isolate, alienate, … We just try to include kids in photographs and then ask the people who are using them to be sensitive to how they photograph. We’re not going to stick a badge on certain kids which I heard is a practice in certain schools. … the pictures. NO! We are not doing that or organizing them so that all the children in care are on the fringes [laughing]. Like literally on the fringes. No, we’re not doing that.
We see how Linda views the enactment of this policy as an injustice for children in care and how participants bring their own “experiences, scepticisms and critiques to bear” (Ball et al., 2012: 15). It is in these interpretations and enactments that the policy garners its discursive effects, isolating and alienating children in care, and thereby generating stigma. The enactment is both a literal and figurative erasure of one’s existence, determining who can and cannot be a subject (Youdell, 2006). The social effect is one of othering, and active and literal marginalization of children in care—their existence blurred out or forced to the fringes—an inhumane erasure of a child’s physical presence.
Inscribing vulnerability
In Manitoba, similar to most jurisdictions in Canada, protecting the privacy of citizens, including students is of utmost importance. Privacy laws and policies for children in care are imperatives that are designed to not overshare personal information in the name of protecting the child. Yet, within the discourses of privacy things can get messy. At one school with a high rate of children in care, Martha explained that the school began hosting evening information sessions for foster families to provide. As Martha explained, she received disapproving responses from a social worker when the school initiated such events: Well, we took a little bit of flack when we first started our foster family group because, [the social worker said] “Well, now you’re identifying and labelling these kids, how dare you do that, you’re endangering them.” … We were doing it from the lens of this is going to be a great support system for these parents and these kids, and it wasn’t something we were broadcasting for the outer community to see. But yeah, we took flack for it and there was a lot of Social Workers who called and didn’t come, and were like, “you can’t do that, stop it, don’t do it.”
The concern was that in gathering the foster families together, the children would be identified to other children and their foster families as being in care. Some social workers felt that this was a breach of the children’s privacy. Again, I do not dispute protecting children’s privacy, however, the discourses surrounding the privacy enactments constructs particular images of the child as in need of protection, foreclosing their agency, reifying identities of children as vulnerable, and magnifying the precarity of their existence.
In some of the schools in the district, the school leaders interviewed initiated school-based groups for children in care to meet, gather, and talk. The purpose of these groups, who often met like a school club over lunchtime, was not meant to be therapeutic or counseling-oriented; rather, the groups were meant to be inclusive spaces where the students could come together to participate in fun activities, and if they chose, to talk about their common experience of being in care. As Linda explained, “They’re just hungry to have a place to feel like, ‘Yeah, there’s other kids like me’. And in that… in those first meetings it’s like, ‘You’re in care? I didn’t know you were in care!’” The participants described the energy and the excitement among the students in the groups about being able to know other students “like” themselves. And yet, as Linda went on to explain: It’s just… that some of our Social Workers I know have criticized [the groups] and said that “now you’re hurting their privacy because you’re identifying which kids are in care.” I will take the heat for that. I just think the value of what that is in it for kids can’t be understated.
From Linda’s perspective, while it was important to protect children and maintain their privacy, these discourses of maintaining the privacy of children in care by not allowing them to claim their “in care” status both produces and constrains particular identities (Youdell, 2006). The policies enacted an obfuscation of particular identity markers, and thus, enlivening stigma to identifying as being in care.
In addition, the effect of such silencing and covering up of these identities, creates a greater sense of shaming children for wanting to know about and ask about their in-care status, about their placements, care plans, and families. The shaming manifest in an overly-policing and paternalizing of the children and their identities. In other words, these discourses of privacy assume a particular kind of vulnerability about the child in care, as if they need to be protected from factors of their own identities, situations, and their families. The assumption of vulnerability ignores the material realities of being in care, including children’s experiences of neglect, abuse, or trauma; their severed relationships with biological family members; the judging and shaming of their families and circumstances; and the silence about the child’s current and future care plans. This particular sense of vulnerability—that children “cannot take” the truth or that they are “too young to understand”—ignores the realities of these children’s lives, and moreover, assumes that children do not have the capacity and the right to better understand their situations.
Martha explained the effects of silencing children’s realities: And we also often don’t know how many siblings were there [in the child’s life], or where were they removed from. They have this whole other life and all we know… it’s like… it’s almost like we’ve erased it for them and put them in a new home and said, “start new.” And when they’re little sometimes they don’t remember…. Like we had kids during the art project saying, “I don’t remember my brothers’ and sisters’ names, but I know I had nine.”
What we see in these discourses of privacy is the ways in which they invoke a silencing of identities of being in care—a status that should not be shared publicly, and worse, that the children themselves interpret this as not being allowed to ask or be actively informed about being in care and the related factors and effects. In an effort to protect privacy, these privacy discourses assume a particular kind of vulnerability of children in care.
Vulnerability in the psychological sense is characterized as a deficit or problem residing in the individual, and therefore, invokes narratives of responses that require the saving or protection of the vulnerable individual. This kind of vulnerability has been a common narrative in education since the late 19th century (Chinnery, 2015), more recently and commonly circulating in narratives of children and youth “at-risk” (Heydon, 2009; Swadener, 2010) or those designated as “vulnerable learners” (Chinnery, 2015), narratives that rest on assumptions of pathologization, depravity, and deficiencies of the child. Such discourses inscribe a saviourism in the adults who surround the child in care, minimizing the human condition of these children and their experiences. Such performances of privacy discourses, act as an operation of power, framing the child in a somewhat lesser-than sense; not quite recognizable as students nor “as a life to be apprehended as a life” (Butler, 2010: 13). The child in care, as a not-quite student, is not afforded the same response as other children, is not encountered with a relationship of responsibility to the Other (Todd, 2003) but rather, is framed through a particular norms of existence that does not quite allow the child’s life to be recognized as a life (Butler, 2010). The child’s perceived vulnerability—enacted through unwarranted and misguided saviourism—constitutes an intelligible student and incites a shameful existence.
However, vulnerability from a philosophical sense insists that vulnerability is not an individual trait, but rather an “inescapable feature of the human condition” (Chinnery, 2015: 2). And although all humans live with vulnerability, it can become “highly exasperated under certain social and political conditions” (Butler, 2004: 29), thus making some lives more vulnerable—more precarious—than others. As Butler (2010: 1, italics added) writes, “if certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense.” To simply seek to “protect” children (by deeming them vulnerable in the psychological sense) forecloses acknowledgment of the complexities of the human condition, the socio-political context while enacting an over-reaching saviourism. Sherman Alexie (2011), an award-winning author of young adult literature explains that the reasons why young people are drawn to his books, is because he does not try to protect children from the “monsters” of the “epic dangers” of life. Rather, Alexie explains that he acknowledges that these monsters exist, and through this recognition gives young people the weapons of words and ideas to fight their own monsters. To engage with the Other as one who is vulnerable requires more than simplistic and paternalistic enactments of privacy and protection, but rather requires a response to one’s precarity and a responsibility to recognize the greater political and social conditions at play.
What does stigma do?
What I have tried to illustrate here are the particularities of these movements, the ways in which discourses related to being in care constructs, erases, and silences the subject. These discourses of deficiency, erasure, and paternalization constitute and constrain subjectivities (Youdell, 2006). Children in care are already marginalized by way of being a “child” and subject to the racist and colonial systems of child welfare and education, and we can see here how policies, procedures, and people that move discursively manifest in and foster greater stigmatization for children in care. Contrary to providing support, these discourses constitute stigma through shaming, dehumanization, objectification, pathologization, and paternalization.
It is worth acknowledging again that the experiences described in this study are from participants who identify as being actively engaged in supporting children in care in their schools. These educators by virtue of their participation in the study have an interest in and are actively involved in trying to improve the experiences for children in care—and yet, identify the myriad of ways that the discourse of being in care are not so easily interrupted. What happens when children in care are not front-of-mind for educators? What are the experiences of children in care when there are fewer children in care in the school and therefore, perhaps represent a diminished concern for educators? Is the stigmatization of these children—when in fewer numbers or of lesser general concern—noticed? Although what is presented here is not meant to be generalized to all experiences of children in care, it is an important illustration of the power of the discourses of particular identity markers and how these circulate within systems and on bodies. A powerful consequence of these discourses are the ways in which they constitute subjectivities through language, performativities, and exclusions (Butler, 1993; Youdell, 2006). The identity marker of being a child in care, creates stigma by inscribing discourses on/in the subject and constituting the subject as other. As Alice explained, stigmatization was something that the youth in care in her high school carried—that they always “worried about being labelled a kid in care.” Her and her colleague, Samson, initiated a school-advocacy group for kids in care, a place to try to build the pride and confidence of the youth in care in their school, recognizing and celebrating the differing strengths, skills, and insights that youth in care have.
However, identities and meanings derived from the discourses of being in care become sedimented and can be enduring (Youdell, 2006), and therefore, are difficult to resist and to counter. As such, we can see the ways in which being in care constructs discourses of “lesser than” others, manifesting in a precarity of identity and representing the violence of identity markers (Youdell, 2006). The stigma of being in care creates the conditions through which certain students are more vulnerable than others (Butler, 1993). Although children are always already constructed as vulnerable, we see how even within the school system, “certain lives will be highly protected… [while] other lives will not find such fast and furious support” (Butler, 1993: 32). Because of the stigma of being in care, the child’s life is not produced according to the norms of childhood; thereby constructing the child outside of the frames of a recognizable childhood, making them unrecognizable as subjects (Butler, 2010). Thus, the lives of these children “are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognized as lives” (Butler, 2010: 4). So, the norms of childhood that produce particular subjects are interrupted by policies particular to children in care, producing subjects that are unrecognizable as subjects (Butler, 2010)—and in this case, unrecognizable as children.
Moreover, the stigma of being in care is magnified by and intertwined with other identity markers such as race and poverty, or by a child’s “mis”behaviours (Janzen and Schwartz, 2018), reverberating through additional layers and lenses further delimiting recognizability. This is particularly salient in Manitoba and in Canada where the numbers of children in care are disproportionately Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, or Inuit), and who are often disproportionately affected by poverty. Youdell (2006: 40) states that “we see how markers such as race, gender, ability, sexuality, disability, social class come to be entangled with the sorts of learners that it is discursively possible, intelligible, for students to be—and how students come to be impossible learners.” Youdell illustrates how the multiple and intersecting discourses constitute and constrain the subject.
Through this analysis, I have illustrated the ways in the discourses of being in care constitute a particular existence, and specifically how these discourses enact stigma. In doing so, I have shown how policies meant to support children in care constitute them as less recognizable and therefore, less grievable. Such policies then, enact discriminatory practices, creating inequalities and exclusions. Yet, these discursive effects do not need to foreclose identities and possibilities. Because discourses are contingent, there are potentials for interruptions and disruptions. Although we see here the discursive processes through which stigma—and thus inequality and exclusion—manifests and endures, I hope this also provides some insights into how these might be interrupted, allowing the identities of children in care to be constituted differently. As Youdell (2006: 40) reminds us, “The contingency of the discursive performative, and the mobility of discourse and discursive meaning, mean that these processes can be resisted, undercut, deflected; discursive meaning can be shifted; silenced, disavowed discourses can be deployed; subjects can be constituted differently.” Through the critical engagement with the discourses related to being in care, hopefully, we can see other ways of thinking about and engaging with children in care across school practices in everyday interactions while also attending to the institutional structures of power wielded through discourses.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (890-2015-0027).
