Community-Based Residential Child and Youth Care Work: Opportunity or Oxymoron?

Abstract

The two articles that comprise this symposium both come from Israel, but their substantive connection to each other may not be immediately apparent. Shlomo Romi reports on sex differences in the attitudes of high school and college students concerning the integration of "detached" youth in normative youth service programs. Mordecai Arieli, on the other hand, examines the implications of admitting day students from the neighboring community to residential schools serving primarily socially disadvantaged youth. But taken together, they illuminate a significant current issue—perhaps the significant current issue—in North American child and youth care work: How can such programs serve as normalizing influences in the lives of the young people involved? Residential group care, education, and treatment programs for young people continue to attract vigorous criticism in professional and lay circles and enjoy relatively little support. On one level, this appears to reflect individualistic ideological predilections, particularly in the United States, with consequent distrust of group-based, communally oriented approaches. Closer to the surface, the argument is often couched in terms of relative costs and cost effectiveness and the idea that residential settings are frequently and perhaps even intrinsically abusive (Beker, 1994; Schwartz, 1994). It seems clear that the results of many North American residential programs have been disappointing, but little attention has been given to the reasons for these failures and to the evidence that such approaches typically enjoy at least relative success elsewhere. Compari-