Contenu du sommaire : Enfants en exil. Exils d'enfance

This article is particularly intended for professionals who are required to look after troubled children. So as to meet the challenges posed by this activity, and develop a plan of action that will allow the relationship to develop, we propose an interaction between clinical practice and neuroscience. This cross-fertilization allows us to see 1- how feelings guide the exercise of the discipline 2- where suffering is directed 3- how the child learns from its suffering and ethical issues that are raised 4- so that the aim of care can be clarified and the child helped to overcome its difficulties 5- and dare to move on 6- The emotions are the starting-point for everything flows from them.

The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the potential the telling of one's story has in the support of asylum seekers. After a brief discussion of the place of the story of one's life in a social work encounter, we look at three examples of the use of story : a project of involvement with unaccompanied minors, a project of research and action amongst refugee families and a project of formation aimed at introducing social workers to the techniques of telling one's life story in order to work with this group.

In cross-cultural social work practice as it refers to the reception of minors from abroad who have undergone traumas either in their country of origin or in the course of their departure, our psycho-social approach can be strengthened by adopting ways of thinking and doing that belong to the field of ethno-psychiatry. This helps us to remember, for example, that the migrant, however young she or he may be, always remains the best expert on his or her own situation. We are then able to see the trauma as the persistence in time of a “psychological assault” on the “matrix of meanings” constituted by the culture of origin, and so be able to treat the trauma by working with the sufferers to give sense to their experiences. This approach focuses attention on the measures we adopt and helps to work out new ones, brings out the importance of the groups clients belong too (and the possible dangers), considers shared systems of thought as distinct from beliefs, and permits the decoding of these systems to encourage a successful readjustment : all this by working with the persons concerned and not on their behalf.

The path through life of isolated foreign minors is often beset by any number of difficulties and paradoxical situations, leading to depressive syndromes and complex post-traumatic disorders. Educational services regularly refer them to the “Maison des adolescents” of the Hospital Cochin (Paris). How is one to understand and work with these young people, whose clinical presentation and life history is so different ? We put forward a transcultural method with two lines of approach. There are transcultural consultations in which the problems of the young person are analysed on three levels, ontological ; aetiological and therapeutic. Then there are indirect consultations in which the professionals who take charge of the young people are seen in order to discuss the situation which causes them concern.

This article presents the results of a programme of research and action supported by the European Fund for Refugees from 2009 to 2011 and coordinated by the Union of Towns and Communes of Wallonia via the Federation of Public Centres of Social Action (Cpas) and its Training Centre. This research and action set out to improve the work of professionals concerned with the schooling of unaccompanied foreign minors resident in two reception centres of the province of Namur. It resulted in new procedures that allow a better grasp of the needs of unaccompanied foreign minors, in particular by developing tools of diagnosis adapted to the lived experience of children and young people and by setting up a substantial training programme and a network for the professionals involved.

The authors report the causes of a largely debated migration, the Roms and mainly their children scolarisation. Many Roms children arrive in France and Belgium who have never been to school before, or very scarcely. Moreover, who has been to school, might just aswell have met discrimination and violences. In France as in Belgium, the objective is to succeed to put these children and youngsters in schools and to recreate confidence between family and school. The article presents some school projects to accompany migrants and notably Roms children.

From the time of their arrival on Belgian territory, all those under-eighteens who are here for the first time should be in school. An apprenticeship in the local language to allow students to pursue their schooling represents therefore a major challenge. The facility of a “transitory class” was put in place in 2001. This method of integrating students has had mixed results. On the one hand, grouping students according to their socio-economic and ethnic background is so counter-productive that it has been suggested that the plan should be simply scrapped. Against this view, it appears that the acquisition of linguistic and academic skills takes time, which would argue in favour of actually lengthening the period spent in the transitory class.
In any case a method of diagnosis and prognosis appears absolutely necessary in order to provide guidance and determine the work of these classes, avoiding abuses. Such instruments of diagnosis and prognosis do not yet exist. Some principles for setting them up are sketched out.

In what way is the situation of minors arriving in Switzerland without their parents “constructed” by the legislation ? What are the possible effects of this construction on the course of their lives ? A tension exists between two different principles in contemporary society and they can find themselves in opposition. On the one hand there is the universal concern for the protection of children, given definition by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). On the other hand, the management of international migration is delegated to states which define who may enter and reside within the borders they control, according to their own criteria. Unaccompanied minors are a sign of this contradiction.

This article discusses social policy and the strategies of intervention as they concern unaccompanied minors in Italy, with particular attention to the supportive role of social workers in the process of social integration of these minors. It also takes into consideration the ambiguities of the legal framework in which social workers are obliged to move, notably the contradiction between national principles concerning the protection and assistance of minors and the norms relating to the control of the flow of immigration into the country.

In the world complexity which conditions migratory flows today, the small municipality of Assesse meets in the center of historic, socioeconomic, political, institutional, educational and moral stakes which exceed widely the borders of the welcome or the accompaniment of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (UAMs). The social workers embarked on this adventure are playing it by ear and are battling against stakes which oblige them to revisit completely their world map, to question their professional culture, their values and convictions, their sense and their consciousness of the work to carry out. In front of multiple questions which move stereotypes, prejudged and other representations of the fact what is the world and of what it should be, the worker becomes willy-nilly a boatman of geographical, mental and cultural borders.