N° 3 - printemps 2007
Abstracts
Table des matières
Texte Intégral
Assessment in Child Protection : crossing actors’ points of view in a multidisciplinary approach
Fernanda Bittencourt-Ribeiro, Annick-Camille Dumaret and Marie-Pierre Mackiewicz
A department of a volunteer organization of Child Protection (Alésia 14) aims to treat the parent(s)-child relationship difficulties and the violence and/or the suffering of maltreating parents. For twenty years, this team has been caring after families in crisis with young children through free phone number, social support from volunteers, tutoring and psychological counselling. These strategies of intervention were assessed through a multidisciplinary evaluation by researchers. An anthropologist interviewed the professionals of the service, all psychologists, and analyzed the corpus of letters between the parents and the service. Through interviews with 26 volunteers working with the parents or the children, a sociologist analyzed the collaboration of professionals and volunteers, the supportive services they offered and their needs of training, with regard to her previous works about cooperation in co-educational relationship. The outcome of these vulnerable families several years after they left the institutional support, was studied by the psychologist through interviews with families and members of social teams of public Child Protection.
The monograph presented in this article illustrates a method of crossing data from several sources and periods of time. The related case represents some of the characteristics of other family situations cared after during the same period. This article shows the coherence in the representations of all the actors, regarding such issues as analysis of maltreatments, parental portraits and problems, types of interventions. Results indicate that reciprocal confidence, therapeutic alliance between parents and professionals is the starting point for the reconstruction or discovery of parental competences and abilities. Whatever the social environment, active networks between professional, volunteers and parents must be developped.
How family history is referred to in « educational assistance » writings
Carol Bizouarn
The French procedure of « educational assistance » requires the juvenile court to order educative measures as soon as it is assumed that the child is in danger within his own family. According to the French civil law, the notion of danger is the very condition of the action of the magistrate in such a matter but there is no precise definition of danger; the law only mentions that the action of the judge is well-founded if « the health, the security, the morality and the conditions of education of the child are seriously endangered ». In such a context, how is family history referred to by social workers, in order to back up the notion of danger ?
To answer to that question, the court records of a family known over 3 generations have been examined. The analysis of the first writings (« signalements ») mentioning an actual danger and requiring “educational assistance” shows that references are systematically made to the the child’s siblings’ institutional history, rather than to the previous generations’. On the other hand, very few of the family history itself is mentioned.
We can also observe a subtle evolution in the writings made in the course of the assistance. First, the social workers and the family are expecting from each other to acknowledge their own model of education, both sides confronting their representations of parenthood. Then comes the time when both parents and social workers bring themselves to accept the others with their own specific representations of how to act like parents. At the same time there is a second process at work. References to previous events or behaviours are progressively rubbed out from the children’s record, as they become parents themselves; then the source of danger is removed from the adults’ side to the children’s. Thus, in the concern about having an objective analysis of the present situation, the social worker eliminates all historical arguments from his reasoning, just as if he now regarded these previously alleged elements of danger as irrelevant.
A Body-based Classification. The Anomalous Postures at School as an Indication of « Deviance »
Matthias Millet and Daniel Thin
Based upon research concerning school difficulties of the middle school pupils coming from the lower working class, this paper shows that the body, through postures which fail to comply with school norms, represents an institutional indication for « school deviance » and maladjustement. Since it gives shape to a « school abnormality », the pupils’ body not only points out the existence of more serious « disorders », but is also interpreted as the symptom of « inner disorders » revealing a « childhood in danger ». This perception of unruly, unteachable bodies lead to the institutional identification and categorization of certain postures as deviant postures. The results of this classification are not restricted to the school field. They are extended to the educational and judicial level. Thus the school classification of the middle school pupils postures contributes to the prevention of what is thought as a risk of subsequent disorders at school or outside.
Youngster violence/violence on youngsters. Crossed views on the perception of verbal violence among immigrant school populations
Karolien Declercq and Salima El Karouni
Among the different forms of violence, from and addressed to the youth, those exerted within the school framework are many and various. The form that has more particularly caught our attention, is the so-called normative violence connected to the language practices among immigrant school populations.
Treating the issue of violence in relation to the norm, whether it be of a linguistic kind or another, is legitimate as far as the former constitutes and destroys the latter. Indeed, the school presents itself as « the place favouring a struggle to impose linguistic norms ». The way of speaking of school actors – a.o. learners and teachers – is an indicator of the relationship that the latter have with social rules in general and school norms in particular. Beyond the description of obscenities, language coarseness and vulgarity of the former, and of the French language « in the manner of Charles-Henri » of the others, these forms of verbal violence in the school framework are worth thinking about.
Moreover, the social imagery related to immigration is so virulent that the equation « practice of languages different from "correct" French, immigration and delinquency » may seem astonishing to some while it is admitted by others. The practice of the language would explain acts of delinquency: to act on the language would be preventive. « Young immigrants had better behave themselves », or even « they’d better talk correctly »! The eradication of violence seems to be at the cost of this simple solution.
It is precisely beyond this naive optimism that we would like to go in this article, centred on the notion of youngster verbal violence, in the way it is perceived and lived in the school framework. To do so, the contribution of sociolinguistics can help in order to delimit and redefine language practices and to supply didactics of French with useful marks for efficient school norm teaching.
Child trafficking in Cameroon. A pattern of abuse towards « social juniors »
Severin Abega, Claude Abe and Honore Mimche
Child trafficking is organised through a system which associates parents – who give out their children for ridiculous sums– with intermediaries charged with sending and placing these children under employers who, in turn, use their labour force. These employers pay money back and most of it is usually shared between the intermediary and the parents.
Analysing this phenomenon leads the authors to question not only informal economy and cash crop but also the evolution of women’s status. Enquiries prove that socio-economic changes in investigation zones increases the weight of women’s work, especially those who gain economic empowerment. They are therefore obliged to confine parts of their tasks to others recruited and put at their service. It is usually those very vulnerable people of the society, those at the base of the social ladder. Children from precarious families are therefore designed targets.