Group homes and residential facilities

Excerpted from Part 4: Special Issues - TAPP-C: Clinician’s Manual for Preventing and Treating Juvenile Fire Involvement.

Considerations

Group homes and residential treatment facilities present both special advantages and special challenges for managing children and youth who have been involved with fire. Many facilities have the capacity to provide high levels of supervision and control over materials in a child or youth’s living environment. In addition, they may provide children and youth with planned, positive fire-related activities. Lastly, they offer opportunities to integrate modifying fire-related behaviour into already existing behaviour-modification plans.

As children with severe difficulties are more likely to have been involved in fire-related behaviours, it is quite likely that there will be more than one firesetter in a particular facility at a given time. These youth may work together to circumvent measures put in place to reduce fire involvement and may exacerbate each other’s conditions. They may continue to perpetuate anti-social fire related beliefs and attitudes and work together to disrupt efforts to emphasize fire-safe beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.

In addition to these difficulties, these facilities are sometimes staffed by young, relatively inexperienced people who may have very little clinical training. Some of the staff may themselves have inappropriate beliefs and attitudes about fire safety and fire-related behaviours. For example, in one situation that came to clinical attention, a group home staff member showed a youth how to explode aerosol cans in a campfire. Other examples include group home staff failing to take fire drills seriously, smoking with residents, showing residents lighter tricks and/or leaving fire materials accessible.

Intervention modifications

All of the interventions designed to be used in family homes should also occur in group home and residential facilities. If a child is having weekend visits at the family home, or the intention is to have the child eventually return to the family home, the interventions should also be used in the family home.

Fire-safety routines will benefit all children in a facility, not just the children involved with fire.

Group home staff should receive training on the importance and implementation of fire-safety procedures. Fire-safety procedures need to be followed routinely and reviewed with each new resident and staff person as soon as they move into the facility, not just in response to the admission of a juvenile firesetter.

In the group home, fire materials should be locked at all times, except when they are being used by staff or residents under direct staff supervision. This includes cigarettes, as lit cigarettes can be used to ignite other materials.

The group home should have a smoking policy for staff and residents, and all staff should receive training in implementing the smoking policy. Cigarette lighters should be removed from group home vehicles used by residents.

All resident responsibilities and chores should also be examined to ensure that residents are not intentionally or unintentionally given access to fire-starting materials, such as gasoline for the lawnmower or flammable cleaning products.

Fire-safe behaviour, such as checking to ensure the escape plan is posted and practised, that the smoke alarms are working, and that exits are clear, should be integrated into existing chore routines and rewarded with praise and other appropriate reinforcers.

Fire-dangerous behaviour, including possessing fire materials and/or providing fire materials to others should be integrated into existing behaviour-management plans and responded to with appropriate consequences.

Children and youth with histories of fire involvement should not have unsupervised access to each other.

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