When things go terribly wrong and children's best interests dictate that they be removed from their family and placed elsewhere, often for their own safety, the authorities seek a placement with relatives or friends or a willing, unrelated, foster family. However, for a whole variety of reasons, such a family-based placement is at times neither possible nor desirable.
Faced with an obligation to provide special protection and assistance to these children, in the past decade the Maltese authorities have placed hundreds of minors in non-family-based ("residential care") settings, often to ostentatiously offer them a quality of care that was significantly better than their parents were likely to give them, in the long term.
A research part-financed by the European Social Fund through the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (STEPS) scheme, sought to explore the extent to which the Maltese authorities were translating their obligations into practice. It set out to explore how the residential care system was serving the needs of minors the state was placing in non-family based settings. By the United Nations' definition, "children without parental care" are minors who are "not in the overnight care of their parents" and it is this aspect that makes these minors particularly vulnerable.
Residential care provision comes in many different forms and just like there is a huge difference between a 1-star and a 5-star hotel, the feel and quality of children's residential care settings in Malta varies immensely. Contrary to the images that linger in the Maltese people's imagination, it need be clearly stated that "residential care" is NOT the same as "institutional care", certainly not of the Oliver Twist variety!
Cross-checking official data provided by government entities for a recent six-year period with data obtained from other sources, it was possible to track most minors living in non-family-based care and establish the residential facilities in which they were living, concurrently shedding light on how certain aspects of the care-system impacted their lives.
An analysis of official databases, policy and practice reports and interview data yielded a complex and somewhat unsettling picture, such as of minors inappropriately placed in sub-standard facilities and others placed in facilities meant for adults struggling with mental health issues, drug abuse and criminal behaviour, simply because adequate facilities for young people who could not live with their family were rather scarce to come by.
Official records showed that apart from children placed in the 12 or so entities commonly referred to as "Children's Homes", many more children without parental care were actually living in facilities classifiable as Hostels and Homeless Shelters, Domestic Violence Shelters, Mental Health Facilities and those that cater for Addiction problems, Disabilities and Refugees, as well as in Hospital wards, in Detention and in Boarding Schools among others.
No government agency had a comprehensive list of residential facilities where children the state became responsible for were being placed so such a list was painstakingly compiled and nearly 50 non-family-based care settings where children without parental care were living in recent years were identified. With no authority having overall oversight, government's National Standards for Out-of-Home Child Care (2009) were being largely ignored and many facilities where children without parental care lived were unlikely to be formally inspected, implying that the quality of care provided by them, and the safety standards that safeguarded this vulnerable group of children, were far from being guaranteed.
Moreover, government-held data regarding children living in residential care settings was surprisingly unreliable. Notwithstanding the fact that an "updated database" regarding children under a Care Order was circulated to officials at the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry for Social Policy, all Police stations, the Courts and Passport authorities on a monthly basis, and despite the fact that government has some responsibility vis-à-vis all minors placed in formal out-of-home care, it was found that in reality no state entity seemed to be aware how many minors the state was directly or indirectly responsible for nor, at times, whether they were living for instance in a Children's Home, or stuck for years in Mount Carmel Hospital or elsewhere.
According to the United Nations, states have special obligations towards children without parental care. Not surprisingly, in the absence of such basic data, professionals felt the state still had a lot to do to live up to its responsibilities and adequately provide for the welfare of these children. In practice, the lived reality some have to contend with appears to be a far cry from what many believe it should be.
The research, carried out by Salesian social worker Antoine Farrugia and supervised by Dr Robbie Gilligan of Trinity College, Dublin is freely downloadable.