Transitions to adulthood and processes of social inclusion: a biographical research on careleavers' experiences

The term "careleaver" relates to any adult who has been in out-of-home care as a child, often separated from abusing or negligent families. The huge social investment of energies and resources to protect these children has created a system of intervention that produces learning, at many levels, but is this learning functional to freedom, self-direction, reflexivity, and a meaningful life (Jackson & Martin, 1998)? What are the conditions to create a good enough learning experience allowing these young adults (Reid & West, 2015) to face the passage from school to work, from protection to agency, from a ‘welfare life’ to self-direction and responsibility? Research on careleavers suggests that transition from youth to adulthood tend to be accelerated and compressed as a consequence of social care systems request to pass from one day being "looked after" to suddenly living independently as an "autonomous" adult (Allen, 2003; Stein & Munro, 2008). Research from the Children’s Rights Director (Morgan, 2006; 2008; 2011) consistently tell us that most of these young people seems not to be prepared for this step. Furthermore many other factors may make this endeavor more difficult: lack of cultural and social capital (see Field, ), for example, can lead to poverty, isolation or crime; e.g. careleavers come into contact with the justice system at higher rates than young people with the general population (Carr & McAlister, 2016). The paper refers to a pilot study in Lombardy (Italy) where different qualitative data were collected through interviews and focus groups. During auto/biographical interviews (Merrill & West, 2009), the participants positioned themselves in relation to received narration based on stigmatization, risk of failure and lack. They referred to “voices” in society and in the proximal systems (original family, children’s home, school, groups, community); they also chose, in some cases, to take a clear distance from those voices, addressing critically to professionals who were supposed to be protecting and educating them. Participants re-considered their past experiences, hence illuminating the learning processes embedded in living “under protection” for years. Which kind of transitional spaces (West, & Carlson, 2007) were able to foster emancipatory learning? Which kind of guidance (Reid, 2016) – or other meaningful relationships – was offered to these young adults to allow what has been called “biographicity” (Alheit & Dausien, 2000), that is the possibility to develop a new script, a different identity/theory, or even a deep understanding of the action of social determinants in one’s life, so as to re-design it in more adaptive and meaningful terms?