In defense of vulnerability

Abstract

Is vulnerability a poisoned conceptual chalice from which only individualized notions of suffering and responsibility can emerge? What would the concept of vulnerability have to do in order to be considered valuable in advancing social justice? In this article I utilize critique of the ‘vulnerability turn’ in child and youth policy as a launch pad into rethinking an emboldened account of vulnerability. In particular, I am drawn to the urgency of vulnerability, understood as an immediate openness to wounding, and find ethical and practical value in the unfinished business of struggling to justly define what constitutes vulnerability and who counts as vulnerable. Grounding theoretical exploration in reflections on unique Australian research on unaccompanied homeless children, the article seeks to advance vulnerability as a potentially radical tool for research and welfare policy that can grip the lived complexity of systemic and personal adversity.

Introduction

Through vignettes from the life-worlds of children who experience homelessness alone, not in custody of a parent or guardian, this article examines tensions around the use of ‘vulnerable’ as a way to describe or define those who may suffer complex adversity. Strong critique of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ and of the characterization of certain population groups or cohorts as ‘vulnerable’ has emerged within child and youth studies and also more broadly across critical social policy, disability, social work and welfare studies. As will be explored further in this article, this critique is commonly founded in analysis of how vulnerability is offered only limited policy scope within the broader context of Western neoliberalism, dooming it to operate only as stigmatizing label which does little to intervene in the structural and systemic conditions which give rise to it.

In this article I speak back to some of this critique. I argue for the continued importance of work to uphold the concept of vulnerability as part of the ongoing and disruptive project of injecting complexity and lived reality into any definitions of human experience. I draw on recent qualitative research exploring unaccompanied child homelessness experiences of mental-ill-health, undertaken in the small, southern-most state of Australia, to evidence the significant vulnerability experienced by unaccompanied homeless children. I suggest that where such experiential evidence can illustrate links between structural, systemic and personal vulnerabilities, there remains scope to mine the place that vulnerability already occupies in social care and welfare policy and practice and to demand—through collaborative, research-led advocacy—a greater public policy resonance with impactful accounts of both how vulnerability is felt and how it is produced.

In what follows I briefly discuss criticism of the vulnerability turn in child and youth policy which casts significant doubt on the usefulness of vulnerability as a concept or definition which can inform the implementation of just social policy and social care in the lives of children, young people and their families. I then look to vulnerability studies and feminist philosophy of vulnerability for tools to rethink the political possibilities of what ‘being vulnerable’ can articulate. By thinking about this work in relation to a group of children and young people whose life paths are shaped by powerful experiences of cumulative trauma, family breakdown and mental ill-health, I land on the progressive possibilities of recognition and interdependence and consider what these ideas might offer to research, policy, and practice addressed to ending unaccompanied child homelessness. In particular, I argue that driving complex understandings of the lived experience of vulnerability into policy and practice holds open the possibilities of urgent and cross-agency responses to the call for care that unaccompanied homeless children issue. In this I suggest that vulnerability usefully disturbs both neoliberal policy and its critics by capturing the bodily realities of cumulative wounding that can never be fully explained as personal or systemic or structural tragedy.

The vulnerability turn in child and youth policy

Internationally, children and young people are generically understood and defined as a vulnerable group requiring the protections of governments and families. In particular, adolescence is defined as a specific period of heightened social, economic and neurobiological transition which necessarily involves uncertainty and complexity (Gorur 2015). In public policy the term ‘vulnerable youth’ has come to refer very specifically to those older children and young people understood to be least likely to have positive outcomes in their transition to adulthood (McLeod 2012). Vulnerable youth are defined as those who experience a range of risk factors which heighten the likelihood of adverse experiences and outcomes. These risk factors can be personal, such as experiencing family dysfunction, abuse, mental illness or disability. They can be systemic, such as experiencing poor access to supports and education. They can be structural, such as being subjected to gender-based violence and being located in areas of socio-economic disadvantage or regional and remote communities. Most significantly, children and young people deemed vulnerable and remaining vulnerable to adverse outcomes longer-term are understood to experience personal, systemic and structural risks concurrently (New South Wales Department of Family and Community Services 2014).

The current turn to vulnerability in child and youth policy has generated widespread critique as a new deepening of old narratives of individual risk that have dominated the past decade of neo-liberal governance in Western nations (see for example, Brown 2017; Keddell 2018; te Riele and Gorur 2015). The problematising and profiling of the behaviour of the vulnerable is seen as a central mechanism for both coercing and rewarding individual responsibility, for justifying selective welfare (see Brown 2017; see also Biefield 2018), and for targeting interventions on emotional and psychological well-being in schools (Eccelstone 2012).

Kate Brown (2017, p. 179) argues that where policy and practice locate vulnerability in individuals there is usually ‘a subtext implied: that an individual or group also represents some sort of threat to the social order and needs to be controlled’. This point where vulnerability translates as deviance is for Rob White (2015, p. 70) the point at which ‘the problems of vulnerable young people are translated into issues of problem youth’. A thin line develops where children and young people may be understood as vulnerable because their behaviour is deemed risky, but when such behaviour is understood to become transgressive, antisocial or criminal, the benefits of ‘vulnerability status’ may be withdrawn (Brown 2017, p. 180).

In Brown’s recent research on young people and vulnerability, for example, it becomes clear that both policy makers and practitioners selectively define young people as vulnerable. Young people are acknowledged as vulnerable when they are most easily understood as victims, and are compliant and responsive in implementing change. In short, ‘amenability, acquiescence and responsiveness all seemed central to the achievement of vulnerability status’ (Brown 2017, p. 180).

For Brown (2017, pp. 180–181) this is the divisive and exclusionary impact of the neoliberal mobilisation of vulnerability which, with its associations of defencelessness, frames transgressive or non-compliant individuals as less deserving. This sets up a ‘double suffering’ for those young people who do experience extreme adversity but who also transgress norms of vulnerability and are thus subject to discipline rather than support (Brown 2017, pp. 180–181). As Dobson (2019, p. 10) also points out it may be that due to a lack of evidence—diagnostic or legal—that some simply cannot demonstrate ‘sufficient vulnerability’.

Along with concerns about who is afforded the status of vulnerability, it is common within Australian youth studies to see the concept of vulnerability and policy construct of the ‘vulnerable youth’ both charged with supporting the conversion of structural disadvantage into developmental vulnerability (McLeod 2012; Farrugia et al. 2015). As Julie McLeod (2012, p. 24) argues, ‘the psychologisation’ of social exclusion shifts blame to individual young people who simply fail to operationalise themselves as competent, independent citizens. Her policy critique focuses in particular on the clinical ways in which children and young people are rendered ‘responsible for their own marginalisation and vulnerability (McLeod 2012, p. 23), overlooking ‘the ways in which environments…actively generate vulnerabilities’ (te Riele 2015, p. 19). For McLeod (2012, pp. 22–21), vulnerable youth are constructed in Australian policy work such as the state of Victoria’s Vulnerable Youth Framework (Department of Human Services 2010) as ‘biological organisms out of kilter’ when in fact, in her view, they should be constructed as ‘structurally positioned sites of complex social, economic, political, transnational and emotional relations’. As Farrugia et al. (2015, p. 177) also argue, such policy work fundamentally ignores material inequity as a core basis of vulnerability.

As Emily Keddell (2017) observes in context of New Zealand’s recent vulnerable children reforms, at best the blame for children’s vulnerability is shared with families which have not provided rich enough grounds for their appropriate development. Again, this results in the containment of blame within families and ignores how vulnerability flows into the lives of children and young people through the lives of their parents, their communities and the unequal social world they inherit. As a result, Keddell (2017, pp. 98–99) argues, there is considerable reform effort and investment focused on those children and young people already removed from families and determined as highly vulnerable, rather than on prevention and supports for the much greater number of notified children and their parents who are assumed to be ‘self-responsible and less deserving of support’.

A poisoned chalice?

In the neo-liberal context, vulnerability becomes an uncomfortable millstone around the necks of child- and youth-focused scholars and advocates because the individualized terms of vulnerability have been seemingly set and selectively applied. Rather than substantially challenging how vulnerability is defined and used, however, a familiar pattern is to reaffirm but reject individualized vulnerability. For Brown (2017, p. 195), vulnerability, and resilience as its just as troubling flipside, can only remain trapped in a paternalistic discourse which aims to give shape to ‘the self-regulating, active and responsibilised citizen at the heart of economic liberal political agendas’. Indeed, she argues that the concept of vulnerability is ‘so loaded with political, moral and practical implications that it is potentially damaging to the pursuit of social justice (Brown 2011, p. 314). Although it remains unclear what these may be, Brown (2017, p. 195) suggests that ‘we might make a case for the use of conceptual tools that are less paternalistic than vulnerability’.

Despite such compelling critique, in this article I explore what I see as the potentially radical value of the concept of vulnerability to social justice, and in particular to the delivery of just child- and youth- focused welfare policy. My central argument here is that in leaving vulnerability untouched as a poisoned chalice and looking elsewhere for ways to frame children and young people’s experiences and needs, lost is the opportunity to undo, make complex and resist policy-wide, and indeed ‘culture-wide repudiation’ (Layton 2010, p. 311) of vulnerability as personal weakness. We instead remain trapped in ships-in-the-night arguments about personal versus social responsibility and the ethical and political urgency of vulnerability is not tapped. In this, the shared fear of vulnerability weirdly aligns those in favour of both less and more social care and as a result the disruptive compulsion for state responsiveness is undermined. Further, individual physical and psychological harm and trauma remain pathologised in both these approaches; the injured, injurable, frail subject is disavowed, shamed even, and attention is turned to accounts of the innovative, agentic, invulnerable self (Cole 2016, p. 271). This line of thinking does nothing to challenge the imaginary of the independent, rational, choice-making adult which underpins contemporary everyday self-experience, and which has become the bounded human unit to which public policy is often problematically addressed.

Given the policy placeholder that vulnerability now occupies in the West, what could instead be encouraged is a more complex policy engagement with the range of experiences and needs the concept of vulnerability can articulate—from suicidality to material deprivation. Because whatever its risks, not only is the prevalence of vulnerability as a conceptual category in welfare politics and policy unlikely to fade anytime soon, vulnerability speaks a powerfully inconvenient truth that usefully rattles policy, academic and advocacy worlds alike.

Researching vulnerability: the case of unaccompanied child homelessness

In 2021–2022 I undertook qualitative research on the mental health experiences and needs of unaccompanied homeless children in Tasmania. This project was part of a program of research on unaccompanied child homelessness undertaken from 2016 to 2022 through the Social Action and Research Centre, a research and advocacy unit within the community-based welfare organization, Anglicare Tasmania. The project and broader research program contribute to a what is a very small body of research emerging in Australia over the last 5 years which documents the experiences of children under 18 years of age who become homeless alone, not in the custody of a parent guardian (Cooper 2018; Chowdry et al. 2018; Noble-Carr and Trew 2018; NSW Ombudsman 2018).

In the context of the broader research program which addressed the care, accommodation, education and COVID-19 experiences and needs of unaccompanied homelessness children, this recent project was specifically focused on this cohort’s experiences of mental ill-health and mental health care and on the barriers within the mental health system to adequate care provision. The project involved the thematic analysis of interviews undertaken statewide with a broad range of professionals in contact with children experiencing unaccompanied homelessness, including homelessness accommodation and youth outreach services, child and youth health and mental health services, and school-based support professionals including school nurses, social workers and psychologists. It also involved thematic analysis of life story work with 15 children and young people with current or recent experiences of unaccompanied child homelessness who self-identified as having mental ill-health and whose participation in the research was closely facilitated by professionals providing mental health and other support.1

Interviews were undertaken in person with many young participants choosing to be accompanied by a support worker during their interview. Support workers provided transport to and from interviews where needed; these were held in private interview rooms—familiar to participants—at a range of youth and welfare community service organisations. Support workers also offered participants an opportunity to debrief on their experience of the interview and any issues their participation brought up. Young participants were given a $50 payment in recognition of the time and expertise they contributed to the project with most interviews taking between 45 min and an hour and half.

A central finding of the project was the role cumulative trauma appears to play in driving both trajectories of homelessness and mental ill-health in participants’ lives. As shown in Table 1 , most participants self-reported both multiple forms of childhood adversity, including physical and sexual assault and witnessing violence. They also self-reported multiple forms of mental ill-health, illness, suicide ideation and suicide attempts. In general terms, it was common for early childhood adversity to prefigure early home-leaving, subsequent exposure to violence and abuse, and what was for many, the early development and worsening of mental health into adolescence.

Table 1.

Young homeless/recently homeless research participants’ experiences of self-disclosed childhood trauma/abuse and mental ill-health

Name	Current age and sex	Self-disclosure of childhood trauma/abuse	Self-disclosure of mental ill-health
Sammy	Male, 17 years	Physically abused by step-father, victim of violence at school, bullying, suicidal death of primary carer (grandmother)	ADHD Suicide ideation
Gem	Male, 18 years	Physically abused by father	Anxiety, depression, emotional numbness, lack of empathy Suicide ideation including high-risk-taking behaviour, AOD misuse
Bree	Female, 15 years	Witness to father’s self-harm, parental AOD misuse and family violence, placed into Out of Home Care for 2 years (aged 10–12), victim of school bullying	?PTSD Self-harm
Tara	Female, 19 years	Witness to caregivers’ intimate partner violence (IPV)	Anxiety, depression, anti-psychotic medication prescribed, AOD misuse Multiple suicide attempts
Marie	Female, 17 years	Witness to caregiver IPV, sexual abuse by step-father, victim of school bullying including sexual/physical harassment, teen IPV (sexual assault)	Eating disorder, emotional numbness Suicide attempt
Neve	Female, 20 years	Teen IPV (coercive control), threats of violence from household member	ADHD, anti-depressants prescribed
Kayla	Female, 18 years	Witness to caregiver IPV, physical/emotional abuse by mother, parental and extended family AOD misuse, teen IPV (physical abuse, coercive control), Child Safety contact	Anxiety, depression, recent bipolar diagnosis Suicide attempt
Olivia	Undecided, 16 years	Death of mother, witness to caregiver IPV, Out of Home Care placement, emotional abuse by sibling, Child Safety Order current (VIC)	Anxiety, depression Suicide attempt
Lila	Female, 16 years	Neglect, 1 week Out of Home Care placement as a baby, parental AOD misuse, witness to IPV, physical abuse by care givers, sexual abuse facilitated by mother	?ADHD, PTSD—Prazosin prescribed for nightmares, experiences dissociation, bipolar, anti-depressants prescribed, AOD misuse
Opal	Female, 15 years	Involved in and exposed to crime-related violence, teen IPV (coercive control, physical and sexual assault)	Anxiety, PTSD High-risk, coerced AOD use Suicide ideation and ongoing self-harm
Issy	Female, 16	Emotional abuse by parents, sexual assault	Anti-depressants prescribed, AOD misuse, suicide ideation, ongoing self-harm, multiple suicide attempts
Tam	Female, 18 years	Sexual abuse by a family member, emotional abuse by father, parental AOD misuse, multiple experiences of teen IPV (sexual assault, emotional abuse)	Autism, AOD misuse Multiple suicide attempts
Jay	Male, 16 years	Neglect, physical abuse by step-father, sexual abuse by step-grandfather	Schizophrenia, anti-psychotics prescribed Suicide ideation, high-risk AOD misuse, including IV drug-use
Katie	Female, 16 years	Limited mention of family, victim of school bullying	Self-harm, multiple suicide attempts
Renee	Female, 18 years	Emotional and physical abuse by father, victim of school bullying, Child Safety involvement, 1 week order	Bipolar disorder Ongoing self-harm, multiple suicide attempts

The continued survival of these children and young people and indeed, their willingness to take part in life story research, demonstrates their breathtaking strength and resourcefulness. Nonetheless, the reductive yet compelling overview above summarises the pervasive resonances of early childhood adversity which repetitively flowed not just into unaccompanied homelessness but also into subsequent experiences of teenage abuse, intimate partner violence and significant mental ill-health.

It was through encountering and piecing together this context of the overwhelming occurrence and cumulative risk of harm and self-harm in unaccompanied children’s lives that a conceptual narrative for my research crystalised. My broad theoretical question has been, how do I best make sense of the intensity of suffering and the systemic failures shaping the life paths of unaccompanied homeless children? Despite the criticism described above, it is vulnerability—especially as defined as an openness to wounding—which I have come to identify as a most articulate frame through which to capture the extremity and perseverance of children’s suffering and the potential forms of care they may need in response. In what follows, I draw from my research findings to illustrate two compelling contributions from the broad field of vulnerability studies. I use these to defend vulnerability as a valuable theoretical narrative through which to progress practical justice for children who experience homelessness alone.

What can vulnerability do?

Vulnerability and recognition

The first hope I place in vulnerability as a progressive conceptual tool comes through the immediate ethico-political task, laid out by Judith Butler, of widening the frame of who is recognized as human and vulnerable as the first crucial steps in affording, protecting and materializing human rights. For Butler (2010, p. 53) this is the important work of addressing oneself to the normative frames which ‘underwrite the idea of the human life that is worth protecting, sheltering, living, mourning'. As Ewa Ziarek (2013, p. 75) notes, this is also to extend recognition to those not yet even acknowledged within classic concerns for institutionalised inequality.

For unaccompanied homeless children the politics of recognition are of special salience. This is a cohort of children who are both known and silenced through inadequate and intermittent representations of their existence and needs in different states of Australia. Characterised as too old for child protection services and too young for homelessness services, unaccompanied children, particularly those aged under 16, may survive alone by circulating through a whole range of accommodation options, couch surfing with family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and accessing short stints in youth crisis accommodation services which offer shelter and support but not age-appropriate or age-specific care (Robinson 2017b). As argued by one clinical social worker, ‘these are the kids that no one gives a shit about’.

As in other nations such as the United Kingdom and Canada, unaccompanied homeless children have at best been long misrecognised as ‘runaway youth’. In Australia, they are included amongst the ranks of homeless young people, and cycle through support and accommodation systems designed to support youth transitions to independence rather than to provide the enduring, relational and practical care developmentally needed by children.

My research certainly reveals that children’s experiences of living unaccompanied by a parent or guardian can counter-intuitively become proof to government services of their perceived lack of vulnerability and perceived lack of support needs because they perform a kind of idealized, adult self-reliance (Robinson 2017a). This supports Kate Brown’s observations about the dangerous double-edged sword of vulnerability and how it can become a label which forms the exclusionary thresholds for care and support.

As revealed in young participants’ life stories however, where families and the state are unable to provide care, unaccompanied children cumulatively suffer multiple adversities with long-term consequences including episodic lack of shelter, ongoing unstable accommodation, physical and sexual assault, poor physical and mental health including high suicidality and extreme difficulty accessing school (Robinson 2017a, 2018).

Giving the fullest representation to this acute and persevering harm experienced by this largely overlooked cohort, is a crucial first step in generating recognition of their existence, and to a asserting a claim to their vulnerability which is maintained or worsened through contexts of repeated harm. As such, through my research I sought to create opportunities for both professionals and young participants to expose some of the lived realities, and in particular the mental health impacts, associated with unaccompanied child homelessness.

In crafting their life stories, young participants clearly detailed mental, emotional and physical exhaustion which seemed linked to their experiences of lifetime adversity:

Olivia (Aged 16): Cause sometimes I feel like it’s [mental health] pretty okay, and then other times I’ll go through a three month long depressive episode, where I won’t do anything. That happened with I was living with my brother and I just wouldn’t go to school. I couldn’t. And everything else. I’d barely leave the house. Normally I’d walk from his place all the way into town and then back. But I couldn’t.

Viviana (17): I was just sick of like always feeling mentally exhausted, to the point where like, even if I got heaps of sleep, it wouldn’t change anything. And I was really over always crying and just feeling helpless.

For Viviana, this exhaustion culminated in a suicide attempt during high school. As she made clear, facing unaccompanied homelessness for a second time, together with the mounting pressure of cumulative trauma and conflict at both home and school, became unbearable:

Viviana (17): She [mother] kicked me out the second time because after everything else that had been going on, like I just felt trapped and I didn’t know how to process the other sexual assault that I had gone through with that boyfriend, and how to cope with the abuse and everything else that was going on, and basically completely having to change my life again. And I tried to take my life…Mum didn’t even want to take me to the hospital…She was speaking to every nurse like shit..she was aggressive, she didn’t want to cooperate…she was getting pissed off at me and said how like she was really embarrassed that I was in there and that’s making her look like a shit parent when she’s not a shit parent…And then CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Health Service) came and saw me and we tried to find me some crisis shelter cause Mum said in there that she didn’t want me home and I didn’t feel safe going back home either. And then there ended up being no accommodation available at all, so I was messaging my friends seeing if like I could stay at any one of their houses. And thankfully I did find a house to stay for the night.

As for Viviana, Issy’s suicide attempt triggered homelessness; the family friends with whom she had been staying no longer felt able to have her in their home and she did not feel safe returning home due to the family conflict and emotional abuse she experienced there. Further, as her suicide attempt took place on school grounds, she also experienced delayed school re-engagement, difficulties managing the reactions of her peers, a shift out of the mainstream classroom and part-time schooling.

Issy (16): I did it [attempted suicide] at school and that caused a whole lot of other problems…I got discharged from the hospital and went back to [girl’s shelter]…That was probably one of the worst days of my life because it was a suicide attempt and that was the day I also became homeless again, and it was terrible, and I didn’t want to be in a group home with other girls…I was there for about a month and wasn’t going to school because it was like a whole safety issue [post-suicide attempt at school]. And I was trying to do work from home [shelter]…They had to contact the Department of Education and get risk and safety plans done and after that I had to push them, I was like ‘Please let me go to school’…it was like oh yeah, we’ll bring you back part-time…And then it was a bit too much for me, because the people were kind of just like – everyone heard about it in some way, shape or form, and the rumour mill had turned it into some insane thing as it does. So yeah, you kind of just people saying, oh my God, it’s Issy, like urgh…It was just terrible.

More broadly, central to participants’ discussion of mental ill-health was the clear connection they made between their cumulative experiences of extreme adversity, their suicidality and other experiences of mental ill-health.

Jay (16): It’s my worst enemy, mental health. It’s like you get onto a drug, you get addicted to it or I got onto a drug, I got addicted to it, and all of sudden I hear high pitched noises, screams, shit like that, and I don’t know if it’s trauma or what, but it scares me…My head was hurting, I was hearing shit and, yeah, it was getting to the point of me just over the hurt and shit in my head and I just wanted to kill myself.

Lila (15): Well, I ended up getting PTSD because of the shit that happened with Dad. And anyway, I guess, just the same with Mum as well. And then I’ve got bipolar but I guess, like it was just the situation where I had to leave…yeah so I wouldn’t say my soul because if my soul left my body I’d die, but you know, I don’t know what it’s called, but like, you’re in your body, but you’re not. So, like, you can see it happening but you can’t like, feel it, you’re like, dissociated or something? Is that what it’s called?

Bree (15): The violence with my dad and my uncle was probably when I was about eight and my pop had died…They broke my auntie’s foot…And then, the first thing that I can’t really remember, but I can, was when I was at least five, six or seven and they were fighting and my uncle pushed dad through a sliding glass door…There was blood everywhere…It was just like violence, there’s people fighting. My sister was hitting herself in the head. My dad and my step-mum almost broke up so my brother kicked a wall, and I just had a panic attack…Well, it’s normally only around violence that I get a panic attack. I cry. I can’t breathe. I shake. Yeah. And it’s usually just around violence, because I was around my dad and uncle fighting a lot when I was younger.

Opal (15): [My boyfriend] bashing me, that really sent me down to one of my lowest points…Like he was my first love and then having someone who you think is first love, growing up you watch movies, fairy tales and stuff like that, then they bash you, your whole world comes crashing down. You’re at rock bottom…But yeah, looking back at it now, like how bad my mental health was, like I was, like, at the point where I was probably two months away from ending it if I stayed any longer on the streets, if I stayed any longer with [him].

Participants also emphasised the young age at which they started experiencing severe mental distress. Katie and Gem discussed a long history of mental ill-health eventually building to suicide attempts in their teens:

Katie (16): My mental health has been shit ever since Grade 5. I was like extremely bullied from Grade 3 to Grade 6 and then moved into Grade 7 and my mental health just collapsed, like my mental health just went downhill horrifically. I started the self-harming and all that kind of stuff. I had no support at all during Grade 7 and halfway through Grade 8 I had nothing and then in Grade 9 I had my second [suicide] attempt…I struggled with moving to a completely new place…[Primary school] did not build me up to any good aspect at all to be ready for high school. And then your family, there was no support at all either. It was kind of like, I was just my own little person in my own little world.

Gem (18): It’s [mental health struggle] always been – like ever since primary school I remember it was always there. But I started really, really badly struggling with it to the point where I couldn’t, I just couldn’t…I wanted to fucking kill myself. And I’ve always sort of felt like but I’ve never actually acted on it. And I started sort of acting on it from just, just by my driving alone. Like I just didn’t give a fuck. It was a hundred mile an hour everywhere…I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to come back when I went out for a drive. I wasn’t ever sure.

These interview vignettes illustrate broader research findings linking childhood adversity, poor mental health and suicidality in particular (for example, see Sahle et al. 2021) and also echo Canadian research linking high suicide rates and experiences of homelessness during childhood under age 16 (Gaetz et al. 2016, p. 65). Indeed, as summarized above, the repetitive presence of trauma and adversity and suicidality and mental ill-health was a brutally clear pattern unfolding across the lives of all 15 participants in this research.

Despite this, according to professional participants, unaccompanied children were likely to struggle to receive appropriate systemic recognition or physical and mental health care—ironically precisely because of their homelessness and unaccompanied status:

Registered Nurse/AOD Clinician: Because they are under 18 and homelessness – they often have really limited access to services. I mean…those 12-15 year olds, it’s really challenging. They have a limited ability to navigate services, they’re got a lack of health literacy merely because of their age, lack of finances, lack of transport. It’s really hard for them to access a GP. Nutritionally they’re often really impacted. I mean where do you stop?

Catherine: And what are the key barriers that you perceive to being able to access CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service)?

School youth worker: A parent. A parent. Because they won’t work with someone that doesn’t have a parent/guardian supporting them. And they’re either – they’re not severe enough or they’re too something, or they’re too old. They’re always too something, Catherine….Too pointy ended or not pointy ended enough. Or not a mental health issue; it’s more behavioural, it’s a behavioural thing, we can’t deal with that.

Youth outreach worker: If you’re bringing a kid to [CAMHS] and they don’t have food, they don’t have shelter, they don’t have care and protection, they don’t have education they don’t have all these things; bring them back when they have all these things, and we will work with them, otherwise it is a waste of time. All of our young people will never have those things…

This is where continued research engagement with ‘bare neediness’ (Vaitttinen 2015, p. 104) together with critical advocacy on the normative frame of vulnerability becomes so important, in this case to broaden the visibility of the acute embodied precarity of unaccompanied children surviving outside the provision of familial and state care and protection. Against Georgio Agamben’s notion of bare, legally unprotected and therefore apolitical and dispensable life, Tiina Vaittinen (2015, p. 113) argues the very material and psychological degradation of the body without adequate care leverages a political response regardless of its ‘relational power’. It is the reality of the body’s primal, enduring ‘need of care’ that underpins and exposes the political question and decision of which bodies receive care.

In this context, public documentation of the exhausting vulnerability and urgent need described by unaccompanied homeless children is one first step in extending their troubling claim on the state. Likewise, evidencing the profound frustration and trauma experienced by professionals in the face of a lack of available, appropriate and coordinated services for these children is another important step in revealing fixable systemic contributions to their vulnerability.

As Vaittinen (2015) observes, even where recognition of the needy body resolves negatively and fails to result in the provision of adequate care, as is observed to be the case for unaccompanied homeless children, the political valence of the encountered vulnerable body remains. Vaittinen’s (2015, p. 113) remark ‘there is no closure as long as there is life’ is a most powerful justification for the ongoing effort of extending vulnerability’s apprehension. As she argues, regardless of whether care or neglect results, we remain in productively disturbing moral-political relations with the needy body in necessitated decision-making about how best to respond.

Despite the known risk of violence and disavowal that vulnerability can provoke and regardless of how we respond, it is in the ethical opening provided by evidence that the wounded body needs us that I locate my first hope in vulnerability. Here, despite the risks of paternalism and more, I have sought to staunchly assert the urgent personal, systemic and structural vulnerability that unaccompanied homeless children experience.

Vulnerability and interdependence

Along with and connected to evidencing and contesting who counts as vulnerable, crucial to generating the implementation of just responses to the vulnerable is broadening an understanding of what vulnerability is. This second hope of vulnerability studies is to consider what could and should be done if vulnerability is considered as an outcome of our corporeal enmeshment in the world. Used to articulate a complex environmental, social and corporeal enmeshment, vulnerability can be broadened to undo the fantasy of the self-sufficient subject; it can differently point to where injury and injustice may take place and to where the practical work of protection, care and repair is needed.

Not only does the recognition of the vulnerable stem from the embodied fact of our ‘generalized precariousness’, according to Butler (2010, p. 61) it is precisely through this corporeal openness and interdependence that both autonomy and vulnerability can be generated. Our mundane enmeshment in the world—with bodies, things, buildings and places—is the precondition of vulnerability and suffering as well as of security and freedom. Holding onto, insisting on enmeshment as the human condition we carry into experiences of vulnerability can yield productive challenges to how the vulnerable subject is commonly understood in welfare policy and practice. As such, the setting aside of vulnerability as seemingly trapped in the discourse of the self-contained subject does little to intervene in or re-work how the vulnerable subject might be understood otherwise.

What makes some of the vulnerability studies literature difficult is the use of the trope of the universally conceived ‘vulnerable subject’ to articulate our ordinary interdependence—with its risks and joys—in the world. This materializes as the attempt to assert the ambiguity of vulnerability—where this vulnerability stands in for our broadly conceived ontological openness (see for example, Gilson 2014; Drichel 2013).

Against this trend, I want to hold on to vulnerability as an importantly specific term which can articulate the often brutal and compounding experience and impact of exposure to physical and psychological harm and wounding. This includes the openness to wounding through cumulative trauma, self-harm and suicidality in the lives of children who come to experience unaccompanied homelessness. Like Alyson Cole (2016, p. 273), I remain hesitant about the potential erasure or flattening of the specificity of life trajectories marked by exposure to harm that the claim to universal vulnerability might trigger. As such, I do not see vulnerability as ambiguous, I see the primary condition of our social and corporeal interdependence as ambiguous and as therefore offering hope for non-violence and care as well as violence and vulnerability.

What is precious about a firm recognition of corporeal interdependence is how this ontological frame can help expand how vulnerability is understood and responded to. And as suggested above, this is again the productive challenge on offer in welfare policy which addresses itself to the human subject who experiences vulnerability. In this I’m attracted to Ros Diprose’s (2013) work on dwelling and ruin which captures a broader sense of the injury, damage and loss that might be threatened and experienced in vulnerability. Her work contributes to widening the frame of vulnerability, to what can possibly be apprehended as part of the threat and experience of vulnerability.

For Diprose, as a body emerges and exists through dwelling in communion with the human and non-human, our vulnerability comes not only through our own personal injurability, but through the injurability inflicted anywhere within the sphere of our dwelling. The openness of the human condition—the precondition of vulnerability—means that vulnerability is not a quality contained in a body but one that flows between the body, other bodies, things and built forms as well as systems, institutions and structures. This is to pose an understanding of vulnerability as stemming from significant damage to the interdependency on which survival depends.

Whilst Diprose is thinking primarily about expanding understanding of human vulnerability which stems from the large-scale natural ruin—caused by fire, earthquake or flood—her emphasis on the complex vulnerability intertwined in dwelling in communion applies equally to man-made ruin such as homelessness for which, as Iris Marion Young (2013, p. 96) points out, there is similarly no obvious party to find guilty. The ‘plight of dwelling’ faced by those made vulnerable is one which spreads between the human body and non-human bodies, things and places natural and built. Thus an account of what can be ruined in contexts of vulnerability for Diprose includes not just the injurable body itself but all the relationships that exist between this body and its surrounding human and non-human environment.

Such thinking in turn offers multiple practical starting points for thinking about how to recreate safety through promoting positive interdependence with all of these. Thus vulnerability in this conceptual frame suggests not the bizarrely conceived push for self-reliance and independence—a state at odds with social and bodily reality as Fineman (2000; 2017) reminds us—but a push to grow protective connectivity, relational autonomy, and belonging in the world.

Diprose’s work prompts a politics of care and non-violence, which in the context of unaccompanied child homelessness underpins a focus on the layers of relational work needed to strengthen children’s interpersonal and infrastructural interdependence. Through the frame of vulnerability, the obvious bare need of unaccompanied children for the opportunity to dwell in communion is foregrounded. In practice, this translates into an emphasis on generating sustained and supported opportunities for children to engage in and experience relationships of care with family, community, institutions and services. This at once may include attending to the vulnerabilities of individual children, of their parents and family networks, and facilitating and indeed requiring the broader provision of age-appropriate care, including access to long-term supported accommodation where family reunion is not possible, access to health and mental health services and access to school.

The need for such infrastructural enmeshment was captured by young participants in their accounts of suffering and survival and through their direct and powerful calls for a broadened infrastructure of care. They pointed to their need not just for psychological intervention but for intervention into the broader structural and systemic harm underpinned by a lack of access to state care and protection, lack of access to complex mental health care outreach, the powerfully gendered nature of violence, and the need for supported housing:

Jay (16): There needs to be help, there needs to be a better child safety services. Like I’m going through court and I can’t be going and doing my community services hours when I’m living on the street. I can’t be healthy, I’ve always got to be looking around for my dangers, like who’s around me or when am I going to get food or when am I going to have a bed next. Like, they only do shit for people under the age 12. What about us? We still need help. Like there’s 12 year olds out there that get everything but then there’s us and we’re down in the gutter…Child safety are nothing but dog shit. I’ll sit here and say that. There needs to be a better place for youths to go or just kids than Child Safety. Child Safety is nothing but shit. Somewhere better and bigger and stronger.

Kayla (18): Just simply having a bit more equity, like with females and males. Like that’s where most of my problems have arised from.

Jay (16): Some sort of drug and alcohol help and mental health is the big one because they’re going to be affected from being 10 until whenever they die of what they’ve been through. So just to be able to give them that help to forget or push back what’s happened, because with me, my big thing is my past; I feed off it and I hate it. But just make the trauma or the past a bit more easier I guess.

Viviana (18): [Youth service] providing me a house to be in is the biggest thing for me. Like I don’t think that any amount of counselling over anything else that affects you is even going to be really helpful if you don’t even have a stable home to be in, like it’s as simple as that.

There were many overlaps in the dreams of children and young people with those of professionals also participating in the research. Professionals’ dreams for system and service change were overwhelmingly focused on having access to timely, responsive complex mental health care that could match the intensity and longer-term support needs of high-risk children experiencing homelessness and mental ill-health alone. Specialist mental health intervention was never imagined as a siloed service in the lives of this particular cohort however; professionals dreamt of new models of age-appropriate supported accommodation alongside the efficiencies of mental health practitioners collaborating with mobile key workers providing stable, relational care and service coordination on the ground.

There was also no mistaking that such dreams were being driven by astute, critical observation and traumatic experience of a current service system with limited capacity to hear and respond to the calls for help issued by unaccompanied homeless children and the professionals working with them. In particular, children, young people and professionals called for urgent intervention into the ways in which child protection services respond to unaccompanied homeless children and into commonly limited clinic-based adolescent mental health care usually requiring that a child is accompanied by a parent or guardian or is experiencing only mild to moderate mental ill-health.

This is a situation which only strengthens the ethical call to broaden the ways in which children’s experiences of being unaccompanied and homeless are understood as vulnerability, and as a vulnerability located not only in children themselves but in the thin and selective fabric of social care which leaves them without safe places in which to dwell. The acute openness to wounding evidenced in the lives of unaccompanied homeless children and indeed their risk of death gives rise to breath-taking accounts of both suffering and survival as well as to a strong call for the broadened infrastructure of relational care needed to bind children back into families, schools, intensive and assertive health care, supported accommodation, and community awareness and connection. In Jay’s terms, this is the hope for ‘better and bigger and stronger’ care.

Vulnerability, advocacy, and care

I have argued that the fact of corporeal frailty and our inherent openness to the suffering of others opens a slim but necessary hope, a ‘primary and unwilled’ (Butler 2004, p. 26) starting point for the kinds of work outlined above that might contribute to a more complex apprehension of vulnerability. This is also work long taken up in feminist ethics of care (see for example Dodds 2007; Kittay 1998; Kittay and Feder 2002) but which repeatedly founders on the observation that neither detailing the fact of corporeal and social interdependence fundamental to the human condition nor the haunting felt experience of vulnerability guarantees justice or responsibility for the vulnerable.

So how on earth do we drive a deepened culture of care through our state, through our systems, through our institutions, through our community, through our relationships with human and non-human worlds? Through all the material and relational infrastructure that sustains us? Following Butler (2016, p. 25) how do we mobilize the ‘socially induced condition’ of vulnerability in the service of resistance to it?

Research evidence is essential but never enough to trigger social change in the face of vulnerability. Amplification—through research-led advocacy—centrally involves continual questioning of the ‘nature of bodies that are imagined in senior governmental discourses and policy construction’ (Klodawsky et al. 2006, p. 433). In Tasmania, for example, such research-led advocacy and collaborative cross-sector engagement focused on communicating the lived experience of unaccompanied homeless children has informed the development of the first ever public policy framework for addressing unaccompanied child homelessness for the state. The framework represents the important beginnings of recognition that a dedicated, whole-of-government and care team response is needed to increase the safety and well-being of this cohort of children (Tasmanian Government 2021). These very recent developments echo policy work undertaken elsewhere in Australia which has explicitly acknowledged that fragmented and uncoordinated systems in themselves are an active causal factor of children’s vulnerability (New South Wales Department of Communities 2014, p. 11).

Arguably, the call for care can only fully unfold from a complex account of ontology—of ways of being and living human subjectivity—and from the dispersed picture of vulnerability that a model of the corporeally interdependent subject makes possible. In this, exposed is the fact that the subject—such as the unaccompanied homeless child—is in fact made vulnerable through independence, through their lack of interdependence with an infrastructure of care.

So to again return to Vaittinen’s remark, ‘there is no closure as long as there is life’, ultimately it is the brutal fact that lives are continuously made vulnerable that will always guarantee something of a response. The work at hand however is to haunt this response, to keep it open, active and uncertain for long enough for socially just relations, policies and infrastructures of care to grow.

In this, holding on to vulnerability as an analytical tool, label and policy place-holder remains vital. The fight to have the cumulative wounding of children who experience unaccompanied homelessness recognised and the fight to grow coordinated care responses—including complex mental health care outreach—are both still needed and ongoing in Australia, including in the state of Tasmania.

As argued in this paper, evidence of vulnerability, of being left open to wounding, is a key ethical, moral and political vehicle to motivate recognition and response. More than this however, where such wounding can be understood as issuing from vulnerabilities in the subject’s worldly enmeshment, a pathway for just and accessible health and social care design is also left open.

Catherine Robinson

is an Australian academic, sociologist and social justice activist. She has a long-held commitment to qualitative research and collaborative, cross-sector advocacy in the areas of homelessness, complex trauma and social care. Catherine is also known for her work with Blackfella Films as Series Consultant and Co-Host of the SBS documentary Filthy Rich and Homeless and she is a Board Director of Homelessness Australia. Catherine is currently Associate Professor in Housing and Communities, School of Social Sciences, UTAS where she leads the UTAS Rough Sleepers Initiative. Her recent work focuses on understanding the experiences and support system needs of children and young people who experience high vulnerability, in particular unaccompanied homelessness.