'You don't have to be watched to make your toast': surveillance and food practices within residential care for young people

This paper explores forms of surveillance within residential care homes for young people. It is argued that surveillance is a crucial aspect of care and this can be experienced as both negative and positive by children and staff. In particular the research was concerned with how forms of control and monitoring are conducted in relation to food and food practices. Relations of power and resistance within the context of a care home are routinely played out and through food. The paper illustrates the ways in which children variously resist and accept regulation and control in relation to food. It also considers the manner in which staff try to implement an ambience and ethos within the care home that is not overtly institutional yet allows them to provide care for the children. In order to achieve this, often contested conceptions of ‘family’ and ‘home’ are drawn upon and operationalised through food related practices and interactions. Three residential care homes for children in central Scotland were studied using a mix of interviewing and ethnographic techniques. Introduction There can be a tendency to understand surveillance in terms of an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ or via Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon where surveillance is associated with an erosion of privacy and liberties and a one sided exercise of power. Such notions, whilst continuing to be powerful metaphors in the popular imagination, have long been considered too crude for detailed empirical analyses of a range of differing institutions and the realities of routine interactions within organizations. As such there is an awareness of the complex relations between power, surveillance and resistance (Dawson 2006; Lyon 2002; 2006; 2007; Punch 2007; Fotel and Thomsen 2004; Wood 2003; Yar 2003). This is the case even within spaces, such as residential care homes for young people, where increased forms of monitoring and control may be thought to be the norm (Brown et al. 1998; Smith 2009). However the somewhat troubling relationship between care and surveillance is less often explored and may, on the surface, appear oxymoronic (Kendrick 2008; Smith 2009). Surveillance can be a crucial component of care, particularly in relation to vulnerable groups and individuals such as children or older people. Awareness that you are being ‘watched over’, noticed and paid attention to can all be positive and affirming for children in care. In this respect acts of surveillance can be viewed of as an integral part of the therapeutic process rather than representing an obstacle to it. Article ‘You don’t have to be watched to make your toast’: Surveillance and Food Practices within Residential Care for Young People McIntosh et al.: ‘You don’t have to be watched to make your toast’ Surveillance & Society 7(3/4) 291 Children in residential care live relatively public lives in the sense that they are surveyed by a range of adults (social workers, key workers, parents, etc.) and can experience limited power and control in relation to the institutional system (Mayall 1996). They tend to be perceived as children who have not been cared for or controlled ‘adequately’ within their own families, thereby representing, sometimes simultaneously, the child as ‘innocent’ requiring protection from society and the ‘evil’ child from which society requires protection (Davis and Bourhill 1997). Children in public care, embodying the notion of both ‘victims’ and ‘threats’ to society, are thus a challenge not only to sociological thinking on childhood but also to attitudes in the public domain. The most recent available statistics indicate that there were 14,886 children 'looked after' in Scotland. Of these only 11% were placed in residential care (McPheat et al. 2007); Scottish Government 2008). Children requiring local authority care in Scotland may be defined as belonging to three main cohorts. Firstly there are those children who are deemed 'at risk' of continued or potential physical sexual or emotional abuse or neglect (Kendrick 1995). Children may also require local authority care if they are deemed to be beyond parental control and are therefore a risk to themselves or those around them (Boreland et al. 1998). Children may be placed voluntarily by parents or at their own request at times of family vulnerability or crisis (Kendrick 1995). These very general categories however conceal what is often a complex range of needs and causations that lead to a child's placement in residential care (Sen et al. 2008). Indeed Brown et al. (1998) argue that as a result of the growing emphasis amongst policy makers and practitioners on keeping children within a family setting those who do require residential care are often those with the most complex care needs and social histories. In addition, the majority of children placed in residential care will have had experiences of other forms of care provision; this may be particularly so in relation to disabled children (Abbot et al. 2001; Stalker 2008). Thus despite the move to professionalize the service and to raise awareness of the positive impact that such care can have in children's lives it remains very much the 'last resort' option (Smith 2009) . Thus it is interesting to consider surveillance in relation to children in care as they are perceived to be both in need of protection as well in need of control. In this paper we explore the ways in which surveillance is conducted, managed and experienced within the contexts of three residential care homes for children in central Scotland. More specifically we focus on the relations and interactions around food and food practices as a way to bring out the complexities and ambiguities involved in forms of surveillance in residential homes for children. Children, Care and Control: Research into Food Practices Marshall (2005) argues that routines serve to simplify everyday life and provide a sense of normality and predictability. This is a sentiment echoed by staff across the residential care homes we studied who emphasised the importance of routines in the provision of care, particularly given many children’s past experiences of instability and chaos (Howe 2005). Food routines in particular, and the regular times and procedures through which it was shared, offered a rhythm and context for daily interactions between staff and children. One care worker described such food routines as providing “themes of constancy” (Garry, Assistant Manager, Highton, Focus Group) within the inner life of the residential care home and another pointed out that: In my own house I can go the whole day without having anything to eat until teatime, so I’m not as aware of mealtimes. Whereas in here it’s very much around mealtimes, everything kind of revolves around mealtimes (Iris, Care Worker, Interview, Lifton [research sites are explained below]). Given the above, a study of food practices across three residential care homes is a good way to explore relationships of power and trust between staff and children and to illuminate opportunities for control and resistance as they worked through daily routines of food consumption, provision and regulation. McIntosh et al.: ‘You don’t have to be watched to make your toast’ Surveillance & Society 7(3/4) 292 There is now a growing body of research which emphasises the social significance of food practices in interactions between children and adults within a range of different spaces and contexts (Jackson 2009a; James et al. 2009; Punch et al. Forthcoming 2010). Such studies have highlighted the role of food in the demonstration of care and its use for an exchange of affection (e.g. Gillen and Hancock 2006; Kaplan 2000; Kohli et al. 2010; Punch et al. 2009). They also explore how power relationships between adults and children are played out and negotiated via food practices, for example, through contesting rules around family and school mealtimes (Grieshaber 1997; Alcock 2007; Nukaga 2008; Pike 2008). Adult practices of surveillance constitute a recurrent feature within this literature on food and children. Whilst it is increasingly seen as a parental and institutional responsibility (Gustafsson 2002) to monitor children’s nutritional welfare as well as their body weight, adults’ attempts at regulating children’s access to food often goes beyond concerns for physical health. Through a control over children’s food adults can assign particular positions to children and, as Valentine (2000) has argued, seek to ‘civilize’ them and/or define them as “incompetent and irresponsible” (p. 259) and in need of adult authority and regulation. Pike’s (2008) analysis of primary school dining rooms clearly illustrates such surveillance practices in the way that dinner halls are arranged such that they restricted children's movements and interactions and maximised the staff's ability to monitor children's choices, intake and waste of food. Children who complied with the staff's preference for school dinners and 'proper' dining etiquette were granted privileges, while children who consumed packed lunches were seated in segregated areas, their food subjected to scrutinising judgements (Pike 2008). A similarly stringent level of surveillance of the lunch practices of elementary school children was reported by Kirova et al. (2006) in Canada. When children enter their teenage years, however, the ways in which school meals are organised in secondary or high-schools reveal different regimes of surveillance. Valentine (2000) speaks of a profound ambivalence reflected in the lunch break practices of the secondary school visited for her study. Staff, too, sought to retain surveillance and regulation over pupils' eating practices but did this through a replication of the food choices available to children in the local shops. The school therefore positioned its pupils as self-determining consumers as well as 'becoming' adults who require protection and control. Recent family studies which have explored