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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/1956/2550
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| Title: | Om å vokse opp på barnehjem og på sykehus : en undersøkelse av barnehjemsbarns opplevelser på barnehjem sammenholdt med sanatoriebarns beskrivelser av langvarige sykehusopphold – og et forsøk på forklaring |
| Authors: | Eikeland, Thorleif |
| Issue Date: | 4-Dec-2007 |
| Publisher: | The University of Bergen |
| Abstract: | Before as well as after the 2nd World war -, to put children into children’s homes
was often the ultimate solution to the practical problem that was facing the social
authorities when private care failed and mother and father proved incompetent. The
incompetency might involve sickness and death, poverty, mental retardation, drug
abuse and alcoholism, as well as violence and physical/psychical abuse. This remained
so even if the first choice, according to Children’s Act of 1953, was fostercare. The
actual period of institutionalization in this study runs from about 1940 to about 1980.
The present study is one where 37 children from earlier children’s homes were
interviewed about their daily life during their stay. This stay was supposed to last for at
least 2 years. The actual range of stay was from 3 years to 19. The interviews were
compared to those of 11 children who had been taken into hospital care in the first part
of the period mentioned above, as the tuberculosis hospitals were settled in the midsixties.
The children from the sanatoriums were chosen as a quasi-control group, as they
were supposed to be the only group(except for the asthmatics and those with
poliomyelitis1) which might match the situation of being removed from home; brought
up by strangers for years, and having the least possible contact with their own parents
or family.
The main aim of the study was to bring to daylight the experiences of children in
children’s homes. The second was to see if – when compared – the daily life of a
children’s home might as well have been one lived in a sanatorium. If so, the national
and international critique directed towards children’s homes might as well have been
directed against hospitals and may be against any institution where children were
brought up.
If not so, may be these instituitons were built on quite different grounds
developing attitudes and ways of handling children which were unrelated
From unstructured interviews that lasted from one to four hours, the transcripts
were searched for the most prominent themes of the daily lives of the children, in a
manner inspired by the the Grounded theory approach. However, the children’s stories
are presented narratively to illustrate the themes found, and as a result the comparison
showed them to be more alike than different in the two institutions. This was a surprise
but not unexpected. Rumours, written documents and autobiographies have indicated
that the way children were handled in hospitals that accommodated patients for years
resembled the routines that have been criticised in children’s public care.
Thus we are faced with a reality that tells us that the criticised suppressive
routines of institutional child care are not restricted to these institutions but have their
parallel ways in hospitals as well.
One troubling fact of this investigation was that the persons who seemed
responsible for the import and maintenance of these suppressive routines were those in
charge; the educated and the Christians among the staff. The people who had made a
vow to serve their fellow men, more often than not, were those called “evil” by the
children. This situation is explained on the background that hundreds of years with
repressive upbringing have created people who do not recognize their tendencies to act
violently when met with other people’s –especially children’s – resistance to the
adult’s will. Thus we are caught in a stream of acts which overrides the pure cognitive
knowledge that we have, telling us what to do and even overrides our ethical
principles. Reference is made to the thoughts of Alice Miller.
However, this goes not without saying that the children also met women who
were described as nice and kind and observant to the children’s needs, and some
children have responded: “she became my mother”.
Another finding has been called “the collective blindness”; an expression that
describes the situation when adult personnel recognize a colleague abusing a child
without himself (the personel) acting. These situations have two typical consequences:
a) the children, who always are aware of what is happening, lose their trust in the
adult(s); and b) this kind of non-responsiveness is cementing these situations and
thereby increasing the probability that they will reappear on the daily scene.
Conclusively, lines are drawn to the impossibility of acting professionally when
in close contact with patients or clients, without being trained to recognize the above
mentioned mechanisms in your own mind. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/1956/2550 |
| ISBN: | 978-82-308-0469-8 (print version) |
| Appears in Collections: | Faculty of Psychology
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