Beyond a Single Story: Peripheral Histories of Boys Brought Up in a Residential School

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, a singular story that speaks of awful and endemic abuse in residential schools has assumed a status as normative truth. Schools run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium. A single story can act to totalise experiences and can occlude nuance and complexity in how we understand the past. Invariably, other stories are to be found submerged beneath any grand narrative that has been laid down. In the case of residential schools, these submerged stories belong to those children brought up in residential schools who do not recognise themselves in the dominant story. This article offers an account of life in a Scottish residential school run by a Catholic religious order. The author worked there over the course of the 1980s and has conducted life-history interviews with boys he looked after there. Their accounts offer a powerful counter narrative to the dominant story of the schools. The article proceeds to discuss the gulf between the two stories from a position of narrative inquiry. It cautions against attempts to judge the past from the vantage point of the present and calls for more finely grained and grounded approaches to social work history than are currently evident.

KEYWORDS:

• Residential schools
• industrial schools
• historical abuse
• narratives
• victims
• stories
• transitional justice

Introduction

Over recent decades, jurisdictions across the Western, world have been confronted with revelations of historical abuse in residential child care (Sköld and Swain 2015; Daly 2014). A belief that physical, sexual and emotional abuse was endemic in such settings has become what Webster terms ‘an unquestioned orthodoxy’ (2009, 10). Residential schools and particularly those run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium. This article suggests that this is a very partial history.

Taylor, discussing approaches to social work history, speaks of the importance of surfacing ‘multiple and nuanced accounts’ rather than ‘a reiteration of familiar arguments and themes’ (2008, 693–694). This article sets out a counter-narrative, which Banberg and Andrews describe as ‘the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives’ (2004, 1). The counter-narrative, in this case, problematises the familiar arguments and themes that have come to define understandings of residential schools, by drawing on the stories of former pupils of one such school, who recount positive experiences of their time spent there.

The master narrative

Abuse in residential schools, especially those run by the Catholic Church, is claimed to have been ‘systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary, (and) endemic’ (Bunting 2009). Ferguson 2007, claims that the Irish, RTE documentary series, States of Fear (Raftery and O'Sullivan 1999) provides compelling evidence that those cared for in industrial and reformatory schools run by religious orders, were particularly vulnerable, being:

… routinely starved, beaten, humiliated, sexually abused, deprived of education and basic knowledge about life, and their emotional needs were often totally neglected. No doubt, not all religious and lay carers were abusive, but it is beyond question that the entire industrial and reformatory regime was an abusive and cruel one’. (2007, 124)

Yet, for all the starkness of the above assertions, any master narrative ‘is only one partisan version of many possible accounts’ (Butler and Drakeford 2005, 235). The same authors go on to note that ‘dissenting and questioning voices are to be discovered, submerged beneath the dominant discourse’ (2005, 137). Maguire (2009) regards dominant accounts of residential schools as being based on inadequate historiography, relying for the most part on non-scholarly media sources, the credibility and objectivity of which she regards as questionable. For instance, the sources Ferguson draws on to substantiate the account above are, in addition to the Raftery and O’Sullivan documentary, primarily the records of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). He explicitly did not examine records of the residential child care institutions. Maguire points, specifically, to an uncritical reliance on the accounts of those who claim to have been abused and the failure to set these alongside other sources of evidence. When one does look at other forms of evidence, a lacuna opens up between versions of the past based on personal testimony and other, largely documentary, evidence (Sköld, Foberg, and Hedström 2012). Indeed, the picture that emerges from contemporary documentary sources on residential schools is one of a reasonably well-functioning system (Corby, Doig, and Roberts 2001). Nevertheless, a dominant picture of abuse has established what De Wilde, Roets, and Vanobbergen (2019) identify as a normative truth about residential schools. They also point out the implications of this, including the representation of former residents as victims and the criminalisation of staff who worked in such institutions.

It is not just documentary evidence that asks questions of the dominant account. Many former residents of state care do not recognise their stories within the public narrative (Murphy 2010). Murphy’s study, while relaying many accounts of abuse, also identifies former residents who had largely positive stories of how their lives had been shaped for the better by their care experiences, noting that their life-chances were better than in a neglectful family. One respondent vigorously challenged the impression that abuse was rife in institutional care claiming: ‘it was a lot of rot … if it went on, I didn’t know about it, I didn’t hear about it … all I can remember was love and care’ (2010, p. 308). Similarly, accounts from staff tell a very different story. Niezen’s important study of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for instance, notes that members of the Oblate Order who ran several of the residential schools, bring ‘their own distinct memories, justifications and abiding values that, taken together, stand in sharp contrast to the remembered experience and identities of survivors’ (2017, 7).

I add here to these dissident accounts in presenting the stories, gathered through life-history interviews, of boys I looked after in a Scottish List D school run by a religious order, the De La Salle Brothers, during the 1980s. I do so as an ‘insider’, an experienced residential care worker, now a social work academic, a position that allows me to bring tacit knowledge and unique insights into the school I write about (Brannick and Coghlan 2007). I begin by setting some historical context around the nature of such schools, which is largely lacking in existing accounts.

Industrial schools

Residential schools proliferated across the UK from the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the impact of urbanisation and industrialisation on children. Two types of institution emerged: reformatories, for those children who had already established criminal careers and industrial schools (or industrial feeding schools) for those who required support to avert subsequent criminality and to provide a limited education to prepare them for work, generally aimed at trades, domestic service or the armed services.

The artificial distinction between industrial and reform schools that had been introduced across the UK in the 1850s was eventually abolished in Scotland by the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act of 1932. This Act also transferred administration of the schools from the Home Office to the Scottish Education Department (SED). Schools could be approved (hence the name approved school) by the SED to cater for junior, intermediate or senior pupils, mostly boys. Following the 1968 Social Work (Scotland) Act, which established professional social work in Scotland, the approved schools, with a couple of exceptions, remained centrally funded and managed through local boards of managers. They were re-named List D Schools for no other reason than that they appeared fourth (D) on a Scottish Education Department list of special educational provision.

The religious orders

It can be hard to imagine from a present-day secular perspective just how central religion was in the history of social work until comparatively recently. Most approved, and subsequently List D, schools were run by religious bodies of different denominations. In Scotland, the Church of Scotland ran several schools and Catholic religious orders others. The De La Salle Order ran five such schools in Scotland.

Catholic religious orders such as the Dominicans, Benedictines and Jesuits had a long-established role in providing schools for the Catholic elite (Smith 2017a). The post-Reformation period saw the growth of a different form of religious life and commitment, bringing a practical spirituality (Rummery 2012) to the developing towns and cities with a particular mission to provide education for the urban poor. One of these new orders was the Brothers of the Christian Schools or, as they became known after their founder Jean Baptiste De La Salle, the De La Salle Brothers, established in Reims, in France, in the late seventeenth century. Although De La Salle was himself a priest, members of his Order were not ordained but constituted a community of consecrated laymen with a mission to provide free schools. Members of the order took vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, stability in the institute and association for the educational service of the poor and were required to give their services without remuneration.

De La Salle and his Brothers created a network of schools throughout France and went on to spread internationally. Following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchies in England (1850) and Scotland (1878) the Order expanded in the UK. They made a particular contribution to the provision of Reform or Industrial and latterly, Approved, Schools. The Brothers’ schools tended to be situated in the country, in some cases on working farms or on the edge of towns providing access to fresh air, physical exercise and good food. No distinction was drawn between schoolroom, workshop or farm and connections were made between these different educational sites. Brothers might be, and were moved across schools and jurisdictions, so several had worked in schools in England, Ireland and Scotland. In that sense, schools were rarely insular but were part of a wider system.

Brothers were expected to follow ‘as near as circumstances permit, the manner of discipline employed by an intelligent working man in his own house with regard to his sons’ (Battersby 1954, 92). Discipline and good order were understood to depend on ‘the cultivation of an outlook’, within which all staff were to contribute to a wholesome atmosphere, characterised by kindness, affection and love. In the early stages of the schools’ operation all boys would be at least nominally Catholic, so attendance at chapel was an expectation but the Brothers saw their role as primarily educational rather than religious (Battersby 1954). St Roch’s, the school I worked in over most of the 1980s was designated an intermediate school, taking boys roughly from the ages of 14–16, although the age boundaries could be fairly fluid. It was set on the outskirts of a Scottish city. The Head and Deputy and one other member of staff were De La Salle Brothers; the rest of the teachers, care and ancillary staff were lay people. It was one of the early approved schools to adopt a cottage system, where boys were housed in separate ‘cottage’ units rather than in large dormitories. When I started, in 1981, there were 4 such cottages each housing 20 boys. Cottages were staffed by two residential social workers and a housemother, augmented by teaching and ancillary staff such as cooks and handymen undertaking care duties in the evenings and weekends.

Clearly, schools run by religious orders were no more inured from involvement in sexual abuse than any other area of provision. As Webster (2005, 4) recognises ‘It requires only a little knowledge of human nature to recognise that wherever adults and young people are placed together in residential settings – whether in boarding schools, in religious institutions or in families – sexual abuse will sometimes take place’. However, an association of religious orders and abuse has become totalised. This was not my experience and this dissonance between personal experience and the assumptions that have come to define public conceptions of the Brothers’ schools was one of the factors that prompted me to engage in academic study in this area. My intention isn’t to deny abuse but to problematise how we currently understand it, shifting how we do so beyond individual or aggregated accounts to consider the sociocultural processes that delimit how personal experience can be interpreted and recounted (Squire 2013).

Methodology

Several years ago, I met a former pupil as we both stood watching our respective sons play football. From that initial contact, he went on to set up and administer a Facebook group for other former pupils and staff members. There are now around 25 members of the group, mostly former pupils. In the context of my ongoing research interest in this area, I have interviewed seven of these, now men in their mid to late 40s, who I looked after for a period around the mid to late 1980s. I would have interviewed more but for the restrictions on research imposed by Covid 19 over the period of data collection. It is material from these seven interviews that I, mostly, draw from in this article.

The methodological approach was to conduct life-history interviews, which fall within the broad ambit of narrative methods (Sikes 2007; Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou 2013). There has been a discernible ‘narrative turn’ in sociology in recent decades. Narrative has been used widely in education, nursing and other professions but less so in social work (Riessman and Quinney 2005).

According to Bruner (1991), humans organise their experiences and memories in the form of narrative. It is stories that allow us to make sense of ourselves and the world around us (Plummer 1995). People’s stories are not fixed, however, but are reaffirmed, modified and re-created in their telling (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). Narrative research is, in this respect, identity work and involves people both relaying and constructing identities through the process (Sikes 2007). We are not, however, free to tell any story but are constrained by prevailing sociocultural scripts (Woodiwiss 2017). The script that has come to frame residential schools is one of abuse, with victims of this assumed to be inevitably and overwhelmingly damaged as a result. This dominant script informs the stories that former residents feel able to tell and can make it difficult for them to tell alternative stories (Smith 2017b). The stories told by the men interviewed for this article, in that sense, fulfil Banberg and Andrews’ (2004) description of a counter-narrative, in the sense that they offer resistance to the dominant cultural narrative. They do not negate the myriad stories told of abuse in residential schools – they are no more or less ‘true’ – but they do provide a very different interpretation of life in one school and perhaps introduce some dissonance to the totalising impact of those dominant accounts. The life-history approach allowed research participants to locate their time in St Roch’s in the context of their wider life stories.

An explicit narrative methodological orientation is in contradistinction to state instituted approaches to historical abuse. While these draw on the stories of those who have been in care they assume referentiality from these accounts to some wider ‘truth’ of what former residents’ pasts were like. Such a quest to uncover ‘the truth’ has become a common refrain in state responses to abuse. Canada, for instance, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) while the English and Welsh Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has set up a ‘Truth Project’. A narrative methodology de-stabilises the prospect of reaching any such truth. Narrative offers a version of reality that is based on interpretative rather than empirical verification. Accepting people’s stories without adequate interpretation or analysis compromises any claims to proper scholarship (Atkinson 2009: Riessman and Quinney 2005).

The research was approved through my university ethics channels. However, procedural ethics prove inadequate in situations where there is a personal connection between the researcher and research participants and ethics in such cases are often argued to reside in a relationally responsible approach (Ellis 2016). This required ongoing reflexivity (Finlay 2003), regarding the nature of my relationship with my interviewees, which had obviously moved on from that of social worker/child in care. As Mollenhauer (2013) notes, when a child grows up, the asymmetry of a previous care relationship dissolves and any continuing relationship is characterised by a greater mutuality and ethical symmetry. Although all of the men I interviewed were happy for me to use their own names, because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, all names and that of the school have been changed but in such highly specific research contexts, there is a possibility that identities might be discerned (Ellis 2016).

The literature on narrative research points to there being no one way to analyse it (Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou 2013). I identify two broad modes, narrative analysis, which is concerned with the structure of individual narrative and the analysis of narratives, which allows themes to be developed across narratives (Riessman 2008). I veer towards this latter approach here, focussing on the themes of care, education and abuse, which are claimed to be so deficient in dominant accounts. I then offer a brief account and reflection on boys’ trajectories after leaving St Roch’s, suggesting that subsequent life experience is central to how former pupils interpret and recount their school experiences.

Findings and analysis

Life in St Roch’s

The quotes that introduce this article point to poor levels of care and in particular its emotional sterility to overt physical and sexual abuse and to impoverished childhoods, suggesting that these were systemic features of the approved schools and especially those run by religious orders. Respondents to this research present a very different picture.

A feeling of care

One of the criticisms levelled at residential care is that it did not offer the kind of care that a family might. Yet, a sense of feeling cared for was clearly evident in how former residents remembered St Roch’s. Respondents consistently identified a feeling of care that, as Kendrick (2013) recognises, could be likened to a good family experience. In fact, several made explicit reference to St Roch’s feeling more like their idea of family than their own families: ‘ … it was more of a family orientated place than I think it was being back home … ’ This was reinforced by one of the other men ‘ … (t)hat general kind of feeling wanting to be there and feeling cared for. And the warm kind of feeling from others was the same, you know, it was a nice kind of warm feeling’.

One way in which care was demonstrated was through food practices (Punch, McIntosh, and Emond 2010):

If you’re lying ill in your bed, your house mother would bring you soup and tea to see if you’re all right and check? She would let you sleep. She would come in and you were up, she would come in and make sure you were all right and that … 

More generally, the housemother role seemed to be a central one in instilling a sense of care ‘ … And I think to be truthful as well, I think a lot of the kids had really a lot respect for the housemothers’.

Another aspect of this sense of feeling cared for derived from a feeling of safety, which Skinner (1992), in his review of Scottish residential child care, identified as its foundational principle. One way that safety was experienced was through relationships with staff:

… I felt safe like … Brother Barnabas made me feel safe. … Like I’d play a game with Brother Barnabas, we’d just have a laugh. … I was small and I just, I just, first time there. So, Brother Barnabas was a big strong man. So, I stood beside him. And he made me feel safe.

Another factor in this sense of safety was routine, which leads to the predictability and dependability that Maier (1979) identifies as central to care:

Well, having a routine, getting up, getting washed. And at night, going into your shower and getting into your pyjamas. A proper routine, you should have with your family, we had that. And just having that proper routine, that makes you feel happy. That makes you feel content. The way it should have been, and the way it was in there. But aye. Like I say, I was happy.

As Emond (2004) highlights, peer relationships, which are often seen as problematic in residential care, were also important in contributing to this feeling of safety:

You just got on. Like your brothers. Your best mates or your brothers, would do, you’d hang about with your pals at that age. You all spoke to each other. You all have a cigarette, you’d give them a cigarette. They would give you one. Everybody made sure they had something. So it wasn’t like … But I just think … you did feel safe. It was one of the safest places you could ever be.

Niall spoke fondly of the staff – he ‘loved them to bits’. He spoke about one in particular ‘He was like your uncle, man. Used to go about with him all the time’.

Discipline

Discipline was encountered as emerging out of the rhythms of everyday life (Maier 1979), reflecting the De La Salle notion of cultivating an outlook:

… you abide by the Brothers, the social work rules. And I was quite happy to do that. Because there was no pressure on you. It was just like, you went with the flow, but you just didn’t (over)step the mark

While there was a sense of discipline and control it was not enforced in any aggressive manner:

… , there was never any violence. The staff were always nice enough. Obviously the was the odd fight like anything else. But it was done and over, that was it, finished. But the staff made me feel, like I says, a lot of them, they made me feel welcome. And none of them were ever, ever aggressive. Never, ever, I can’t remember one ever being aggressive.

I was able to engage with Callum, who had gone on to become a care worker in local authority children’s homes and to contrast the prevalence of restraint there with what he remembered at St Roch’s ‘ … There was never any restraints. I could never … can you remember any restraint? I can never remember’. I could remember some but they were few and far between and tended to be instinctive responses to particular situations, which Peter captured well:

… And don’t get me wrong, sometimes when you step through the line, you maybe got taken by the scruff of the neck. But remember, we weren’t angels. … ken (know) what I mean? So it wasn’t a case of ‘well, okay, come on. Will you calm down?’ because there was no calming you down. When you went off on one, you went off on one. You had to be restrained. Ken (know) what I mean? So yeah, there was nobody went OTT (over the top), that’s for sure.

The role of the brothers

The Brothers played a central role in this culture of care: ‘Brother Lawrence (headmaster) was a saint. He’d always make sure you had tobaccy and cigarette papers and … that’s what it is, it’s a family’. Callum remembered: Brother Lawrence

used to sit in his wee (small) office. You’d go up the stairs and there was the wee office that he had, and I still remember … when you went up to the office. And he was … always kind of made you feel safe and made you feel wanted.

This sense of feeling wanted might fit with Charles and Alexander’s (2014) conceptualisation of the importance of conveying a quality of mattering to young people, of signalling that they are important to carers, that they are worthy of attention and that carers are prepared to spend focussed time with them.

The Brothers’ caring mission extended to boys’ families. One man made reference to how the Brothers ‘used to go and help some of the kids’ mums when they moved into new houses. They used to decorate, paint for them. Or they used to get furniture for them … ’. This perhaps exemplified the Order’s practical Christianity, a response to social need, unrelated to religiousity. In fact, what was apparent was that religion was not pushed upon the boys:

There was never any pressure to be religious or anything. I remember going to the wee thing (Assembly) in the morning, we did a couple of wee prayers or something before you go to school. But there was never any pressure. I think maybe even kids that chose to sit out of that … They were absolutely fine with that. But no, there was never any pressure

Another reflected that he ‘didn’t know that the school was run by Brothers, I really didn’t. I just thought they were there in helping out’.

Education

Men’s memories of education reflect the De La Salle ideal of a broad socio-educational experience that went beyond the classroom:

‘To be honest, I actually enjoyed it. I … The only thing I didn't like was English and maths. But everything else, I liked my art, I liked welding and all that. Woodwork. … I liked PE and that’. Anything like that was alright … Yeah. It helped me … welding and woodwork. And actually because I enjoyed it so much, I actually still do it to this day … I fix cars and I do building work.

Outdoor education, both timetabled and in evening activities, was a central feature of the school experience. Men recalled going swimming, jumping off cliffs and horse-riding. Beyond these daily activities, men recounted an incredibly rich environment. One of the highlights of this were annual weekend trips to a similar school in England to play football, which also involved taking in a professional football game and trips to the fun-fare. Others went on ski-trips, cycle trips around Scotland, staying in youth hostels ‘ … one place to another place to another place to another place. We were away a lot. We had outdoor pursuits. You name it. Everything. Everything’. I remember a colleague and I took one of the boys to watch the football team we all supported playing in Europe, his first trip abroad. Other experiences included a trip across Europe through Paris to Rome where the group stayed at a De La Salle house. Other trips were to North Africa and America. This was not the impoverished childhood of received discourse.

Abuse

Former residents were all aware of the thorny issue of abuse in residential schools. Indeed, one of the events that brought them together in the Facebook page was the conviction of a staff member whom they all recalled fondly and whose conviction they all disputed. But they had clearly given some reflexive consideration to the possibility of abuse having happened:

… see, I’ve thought about that … , right, and ken (know), I racked my head and my brain. Because you read all this stuff about … and that and you’re thinking, you’re obviously going to think ‘was there anything that went on?’, you know?

Peter, who for various reasons couldn’t go home and spent long periods in the school reinforced this point:

I think if that had happened, I would be the first one to say. I was kept in for fourteen weekends. And when these things were meant to be going on, I was present. So, I certainly wasn’t walking about (with my eyes shut). Ken (know) what I mean?

This sense of understanding and trusting their own experiences was raised by a number of men who, echoing a previous article with another former St Roch’s boy (Smith 2017b), all made the same point that if anything had happened, it would have ‘gone around like wildfire. Everybody knew everybody’s business’. At one level this might be thought of as naive and failing to take into account the kind of secrecy that can characterise abuse and particularly sexual abuse and, of course, one cannot discount such individually abusive relationships. There is also the possibility of situations that were not fully understood as abusive at the time but perhaps were subsequently (Clancy 2011). However, what the accounts of the men interviewed do challenge is the institutional and systematic nature of abuse, which is reported by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (2020) to have been an ‘open secret’ in such settings. This, clearly, was not the case in St Roch’s.

Those interviewed understood many allegations of abuse to be motivated by the prospect of financial compensation: ‘(t)he people who made the allegations, I don’t know why, maybe they’re just after money. Maybe they’re just … but in my time there, it never happened’. Another said: ‘Money. That’s the truth of it. I was reading on the internet, was it fifty grand? It’s enough to make anybody lie’. He went on to say how he had been approached a number of years ago to concoct allegations against staff. He also identified particular firms of lawyers as being central to encouraging and advancing such claims.

This can be a difficult point to make, for in questioning some motivations for making claims of abuse, it can be seen to be dismissive of the accounts of those who claim abuse. As a consequence, few in social work have raised the possibility of false allegations (Beckett 2002, being an exception). Yet it is a serious and documented problem; Webster (2005) details the centrality of false allegations in driving the entire discourse on abuse in care, while Sikes and Piper (2009) and Burnett (2016) identify a range of reasons that might motivate wrongful allegations. While social work practitioners and academics should rightly be concerned about instances of abuse in state care, they should be cognisant of the context in which many of those claims are made. They should certainly not be so naive as to assume that the motives of those lawyers who are instrumental in encouraging and advancing many of the claims are always honourable.

After St Roch’s

The trajectories of the boys on leaving St Roch’s mirror those in Walter and Walter’s (1978) study of List D Schools – an initial period of difficulty settling back home and the resumption of offending behaviour before settling down. Five of the seven spent some time in prison, for the most part briefly. All had turned round their lives to varying degrees, however, partly as a result of entering into a stable relationship and going on to have children. Talking of one of the other boys from that period, Kyle observed, making a link between the supports provided in a romantic relationship with the care he felt at St Roch’s:

Aye, looks like he’s doing great now. He’s found a woman, which is usually what helps. It’s all been really good women that I’ve been with. None of them took drugs. They all worked, they all had jobs. You know what I mean? And that kinda helped, it kind of helps, like being in St Roch’s, being the way it was, it helped me, just having that routine, and just having people that cared.

Another man attributed his journey to desistance from crime (Weaver 2015) to becoming a father ‘ … I had the wake-up call. I thought ‘ken what? I’ve got a daughter now. I have to think about that’. Several mentioned their experience of care in St Roch’s as having influenced their own approach to parenting. Interestingly, none of the men’s children had followed them into the care system or had become involved in offending; at least three had gone on to university, others to college, raising questions as to the assumption of the intergenerational effects of care.

All of those interviewed referred to other former pupils whose lives had taken less positive directions, many of whom had died, a fact that was attributed, primarily to them becoming involved with drugs: ‘Drugs. Drugs. I seen them in prison. And they were caught up deep in drugs. A lot deeper than me, a lot deeper than me. I was lucky to not overdose’. Recourse to drugs was understood, not in terms of a response to their time in care, but in terms of the washout effect, whereby gains made in residential care can be lost on returning to the home circumstances boys had left: ‘they went back to the problem. If you go back to the problem then what’s going to happen? It’s going to go to a time bomb. And it’ll blow’. Drug use was also attributed to relational and social factors, such as the failure to replace the care experienced in St Roch’s through subsequent caring relationships or the structure it had offered with suitable employment. A particular historical context was also identified:

When I first left St Roch’s, at that time, drugs was recreational, uppers and stuff. The clubbing scene came out then. And then, it seemed when I got to about ‘96, ‘95, heroin just hit the streets and Trainspotting (the Irvine Welsh movie) came out and everybody was going daft

This observation suggests the merits of bringing a broader sociocultural lens to the lives of care leavers. The political context from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, at the point when former residents might be expected to be settling down, was of the closure of heavy industries, privatisation and mass unemployment. There were few prospects and for care leavers at this time and a wider popular culture which made drugs an attractive refuge from the resultant sense of anomie. Yet this political and economic context is rarely acknowledged in government-sponsored inquiries into care which are invariably focussed on abuse in care and reductionist assumptions of drug and alcohol use as a response to this.

Looking back

As noted previously, recounting one’s life history entails identity work, involving a fusion of horizons between past and present and the relationship between the two. The act of looking back rarely involves direct recall; the past is inevitably refracted and interpreted in light of present and intervening circumstances. One of the things that were apparent in my interviews was that there was a moral dimension to the narrative pathways of the men I interviewed that was central to how they constructed their identities. Campbell and Manning (2018) differentiate between dignity cultures and victim cultures. Dignity cultures expect victims to exercise self-restraint and to be charitable in disagreement. Victim cultures on the other hand, portray claimants as slighted, emotionally fragile, vulnerable and weak. Status is accorded through a personal narrative of suffering. A sense of having acquired an outlook consistent with a dignity culture was evident in the stories of those who looked back positively on their experience in St Roch’s:

Well, do you know, I look back on it and I say to myself, ‘see if it wasn’t for St Roch’s? I maybe wouldn’t have ended up the man I was today, because … St Roch’s … they learned you right from wrong

For some former residents who had never really escaped the drugs and prison stage or who, for whatever other reason might be down on their luck, it may be understandable that they seek to make sense of present difficulties through reference to something from their past. And in a climate where stories of abuse in residential care are so ubiquitous, then small remembered acts of disrespect or misrecognition that might otherwise be understood as central to the rupture and repair of everyday care might be amplified to become something they were never understood or interpreted to be at the time (Hacking 1991). In this respect, some of those who recount such stories may not necessarily be victims of abuse but of the limited means available in a therapeutic culture to be able to make sense of their lives (Woodiwiss 2017). This observation problematises the overly simplified categorisation of victim/survivors and perpetrators (Niezen 2017) that inquiry reports seek to impose, rendering the difference in many cases as one of interpretation of experience rather than the experience itself.

The problem with this, though is that telling such stories has implications for others, which was identified by one of the respondents who recognised that other former residents ‘might have a habit … probably through no choice of their own, drink or drugs. Right? Or even gambling … but what it’s also doing is ruining somebody else’s life.’ Ken what I mean? Unnecessary … ’

Discussion

I proceed in this penultimate section to try to make some sense of the gulf between the stories told here and the grand narrative that has been laid down on residential schools. One might be led to imagine that St Roch’s was an outlier among residential schools. And, while I do think that St Roch’s at that time had several good staff in key positions, I suspect it wasn’t unique and that it is just that the stories from many other similarly good schools have not yet been surfaced. So how might one begin to explain this narrative gap (Edwards 2012) that is so evident? I offer some brief thoughts that merit further exploration.

The first is that the framing of the past of residential schools is has become highly politicised, arguably, less to do with former pupils remembering their pasts than with a wider cultural and political turn towards remembrance (Calder 2008). Remembrance is not anchored in particular events but, rather, ‘is a practice to be decided upon. It involves values, agency, interests, discrimination. It is a judgement on what is worthy of commemoration’ (2008, 49). It is, thus, malleable, and open to appropriation as moral capital. To memorialise the abuse of children in care fits within and is arguably a product of present-day therapeutic culture (Furedi 2017) and while it might be right that this is the case, it is also politically expedient.

Against this therapeutic backdrop, remembrance in the context of residential schools has been appropriated within the legal concept of transitional justice (Niezen 2019; Sköld and Markkola 2020), which claims to identify past human rights abuses and the need to offer redress for resultant psychological trauma. State responses to allegations of abuse follow a formulaic pattern of advocacy, public inquiry, personal testimony, media coverage and official apology (Murphy 2010; De Wilde, Roets, and Vanobbergen 2019). The inquiry stage in this process is little more than state-sponsored memory work (Cohen 2001). The remit of a Scottish initiative, for instance, was set out to hear the stories of those who had been in care, ‘especially abusive ones’ (Smith, Cree, and Clapton 2012). It is hardly surprising that the conclusions of such processes act to reify an impression of systemic and endemic abuse; if not deliberately designed to do so, their methods make this inevitable.

As Niezen (2017) observes, Inquiries make poor historians, even though their deliberations are accorded the status of historical truth. The narrative that has developed is mediated and manipulated in public discourse by dominant professional and activist groups (Niezen 2016); the stories that are accepted and valorised reflect a particular version of victimhood. The perspectives of those who lived and worked in the schools and their very different memories are invariably written out of the dominant story (Niezen 2017). The men whose stories are recounted in this article do not fit with the victim story – they are the wrong kind of residential school pupil, the kind that resists victimhood. Theirs are the silent voices who have no desire or need to speak to the various forums set up to listen to victims. On the other hand, not speaking out potentially associates them with ‘a version’ of their past, that they do not recognise or own (De Wilde, Roets, and Vanobbergen 2019). The consequences for former staff members subject to allegations made against them are even more stark, ruining careers and lives (Burnett, Hoyle, and Speechley 2017; Burnett and Speechley 2021). As Webster (2009) observes, we compound a historical lack of respect for residential workers by demonising them.

If we are really interested in coming to anything like a ‘truth’ of what residential schools were like, there is a need to broaden the historiographical base to listen to those who tell different stories and to look to other sources of information such as contemporary reports but, mostly, to take into account the context of how particular stories might be constructed.

In drawing towards a conclusion, I briefly introduce Rini’s (2019) essay on epoch relativism. Rini cautions against passing condemnatory judgments on the past on the grounds that to do so leaves us open to similar condemnation from the future – we are left morally hopeless. Rini suggests that we need to move beyond normative abstractions to be able to understand the social practices in how people lived and operated. Residential schools run by religious orders might appear alien from the vantage point of the present, but they were different rather than worse than present day care and, in their passing, we may have lost something along the way (Smith 2015). As Webb concludes, in contrasting a religiously inspired version of child care with present day provision, ‘the drawing of any invidious comparisons with what takes place today in “corporate care” might invite a brief reflection on the parable of the mote and the beam’ (2010, 1400). One might ponder what judgement the future will pass on present day care that lacks any obvious moral purpose, beset with what Webb (2010) identifies as ‘insidious leniencies’ – care that, as a result, struggles to offer the young people placed there the kind of love and control they crave; care that, under the guise of health and safety and ‘safe care’ denies children access to the richness of the relationships and new experiences St Roch’s offered. And, what judgements might the future pass on political and professional responses to allegations of abuse in care that, rather than ameliorating past experience might ‘fix’ one identity, the abused care leaver, at the expense of other, more hopeful possibilities, a system that risks constructing the very problem it professes to address.

Conclusion

Taylor (2008) queries the tendency in social work to rely on ‘received’ narratives and makes the case for a more finely grained historiography. In the context of residential child care, this would require that the field be freed from the single story that currently frames it. Such a story, as the narratives recounted here indicate, is at best partial. Challenging the received history of residential schooling is not to make a case for its return – that is a world we have lost. Nor is it to let social work off the hook of coming to terms with some of the darker episodes in its history – but it should also be incumbent upon the profession to ensure that any history it seeks to pass judgment on is a suitably grounded and rigorous one. Failure to do so leaves it open to the condemnation of future generations who might, rightly, look askance at current day practice.

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Mark Smith

Mark Smith was a practitioner and manager in residential school settings for almost 20 years. He moved into academia in 2000, where his first post was to develop a Master's in Residential Child Care. He is currently Professor of Social Work at the University of Dundee, Scotland.