The ideological underpinnings and political usefulness of residential care for children and young people

Abstract

This review takes a close look at three studies exploring residential care for children and young people and the mechanisms that lead to children ending up there. The studies examine three different national settings – Japan, Russia and China (Goodman, 2000; Khlinovskaya Rockhill, 2010; Wang 2016) – exploring the specific historic, economic, political and socio-cultural forces which have shaped the emergence and development of children’s residential care in each country and to which they also respond. Spanning roughly two decades between them, all three studies are concerned with specific and concrete cases (Lund, 2014: 225), focusing on real events, each at a specific place and time in history. Ahead of their time, the three studies connect research foci on children and young people with more far-reaching phenomena, with the insights these connections have to offer enabling a better understanding of the human condition more generally (Spyrou, 2018: 2). All three studies demonstrate how research into residential care for children and young people can serve as a magnifying glass on the wider social, political and economic processes in a given society, as well as on the prevailing value systems that inform conceptualizations of children, childhoods, gender roles and the ideal family. The three studies have not only been chosen because of their high quality, but also because the kind of research which they represent is quite rare – perhaps because conducting it requires a specific combination of formal conditions and a researcher equipped