Lived experiences of First Nations children in Therapeutic Residential Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: First Nations children and young people are disproportionately represented in residential care in Australia. This overrepresentation is a direct consequence of the enduring legacy of colonialism and assimilation policies that have fractured Indigenous families and communities. OBJECTIVE: This article examines the lived experiences of First Nations young people living in Therapeutic Residential Care (TRC) settings, exploring what supports their wellbeing and what constrains it. PARTICIPANTS: Sixteen First Nations young people aged 12-18 living in TRC settings across New South Wales, Australia. METHODS: Using thematic analysis informed by Critical Race Theory, the study privileges the voices of young people, positioning them as knowledge-holders whose insights are too often marginalised or excluded from policy discourse. RESULTS: Participants identified key enablers of wellbeing, including relational stability, cultural affirmation, and opportunities for autonomy and growth. Constraints included frequent relocations, disempowering routines, fractured identity, and cultural disconnection. Themes of systemic racism and the need for cultural safety emerged strongly. Young people articulated both what the system must stop doing (e.g., disempowering practices) and what it must do more of (e.g., honoring relationships, embedding cultural safety, and enabling agency). CONCLUSIONS: The study highlights the urgent need for structural reform in TRC, grounded in Indigenous perspectives and relational accountability. Elevating the lived expertise of First Nations young people is essential to creating culturally safe, empowering care environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".