"CHILD SOCIAL PROTECTION" RECODED.

The report presents some challenging issues regarding the drop-out of social care of institutionalised children leaving the residential (specialised institutions) or non-residential (assisted loggings for instance) care system. The situation and the major difficulties of the children, teenagers and youngsters having to leave the formal social care system were not sufficiently investigated, mostly because of the huge heterogeneity of the individual social trajectories, because of the diversity of cultural, political, financial and subjective factors operating simultaneously and of numerous social actors not always acting converging. The “traditional” social care (that assures for the beneficiaries a certain specific “safety”) finishes in some cases in the moment the young adult has to leave an institution and has to face the realities of the labour market. The assessments of the drop-outs (and sometimes also the official statistics) are only sporadic and with less relevance for an objective social cartography. The aim of the present study was to identify some of the most relevant risk factors and the most frequent scenarios associated with dropping out of contacts with community-based social care services and also to analyse some of the possible strategies in order to avoid the rapid deterioration of the status of the young people leaving the “safe formal care system”.