Institutional escapes, breaks, and continuities: Reframing running away from residential child care institutions

Abstract This article offers a novel approach to understand the phenomenon of running away from residential care institutions, challenging prevailing views that pathologize these incidents as individual deviance. Drawing on insights from the sociology of escape and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of rhizome and lines of escape, we examine spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions of institutions, revealing the porous nature of institutional boundaries and non-linear characteristics of runaways. By reframing runaways as integral to institutional life rather than isolated events, we argue against reducing them to individual traits. Running away serves as pivotal moments that disrupt and shape institutional norms, highlighting inherent limitations in care. Conceptualizing running away as running-around within the institutional assemblage, we challenge binary inside/outside distinctions and argue that they oversimplify institutional complexity. Our analysis underscores how institutions exert totalizing control through surveillance, while being transformed through acts of running away. Examining the employees’ experiences though five focus group interviews, we critique the conventional perception of institutions as places of care, emphasizing their unbounded and multifaceted social configurations. We discuss how institutional powers shape semiotic systems that govern young people’s behaviour, advocating for a nuanced understanding of residential institutions as rhizomatic formations, where individual actions continually reshape institutional practices and perceptions.