Child and Adolescent Care Services

Summary In response to the so-called “refugee crisis,” the Catalan regional government set up experimental services for children migrating without guardians, with the explicit aim of safeguarding their rights. With their continued arrival, however, overcrowding in the facilities and the youths’ educational and life prospects have become topics of fierce debate. This article investigates whether young migrants can live in the educational centers that host them. Basing ourselves on the distinction between occupying and living in a place, we call into question the conditions of non-life that, from the educational perspective, the reception system offers migrant youth. A qualitative study was undertaken to gather and triangulate the views of the young migrants ( n = 42), and that of their social educators ( n = 15), and of the management of the reception centers ( n = 2). Findings Despite efforts to put in place policies affording quality attention, a series of contradictions cause the system to favor the homogenization of outcomes rather than adequately acknowledging and addressing the youths’ individual needs. This added to the lack of resources mobilized, has yielded the result that the system that supposedly provides protection for minors, rather than being a lived-in place, has become a classical example of a non-occupied space. Applications Providing a habitable place depends on the pedagogical commitment of social educators and managers to offering these children the chance to build emotional ties with the center, so that it may become a proper place in the world despite the bureaucratic and structural hurdles.

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Challenges and Perspectives in the Care of Young Unaccompanied Migrants

Baños,

Martí,

Niella

et al. 2024

Advances in Educational Marketing, Administration, and Leadership

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Young people migrating alone is a group that requires special attention from government institutions and the corresponding professionals. The educational care of these young people who migrate alone is a highly complex task. This chapter presents a descriptive-comprehensive study using the survey technique with 17 semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that the educational task is largely carried out by the professional figure of social education, even when the professionals do not have the necessary resources to offer adequate attention to these young people who migrate alone. However, despite the advances and improvements in training with the entry of the European higher education area, social education professionals who work with young migrants alone continue to be one of the groups most likely to suffer from burnout syndrome due to the highly stressful conditions of their work. Therefore, these professionals continue to demand recognition and face new work challenges and conflict situations that are linked to their emotional and ethical dimension.

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Child and Adolescent Care Services

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

Evaluation of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue Competencies. Identification of Factors Related with Its Performance among Adolescents in the City of Barcelona

Evaluation of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue Competencies. Identification of Factors Related with Its Performance among Adolescents in the City of Barcelona

Protection of unaccompanied child and adolescent migrants in Catalonia: Inhabited places, occupied places or non-places?

Challenges and Perspectives in the Care of Young Unaccompanied Migrants

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