Report finds that children become known as persistent offenders while in care

Fast-track panels ‘biased’ against children in care

Nearly a third of persistent young offenders targeted under the Scottish Executive’s fast-track children’s hearing pilots are in local authority residential care. Many did not have a record of offending before they came into care and seem to be finding themselves in trouble with the authorities for relatively minor offences which take place in residential homes and not in the community.

The research into the fast-track experiment has called into question whether the strategy is failing to deal with the most serious offenders, or merely persecuting the “usual suspects”.

While a proportion of young people taken into care are there partly because of their behaviour, some may be falling foul of inexperienced staff who are too quick to call on police or are racking up charges because they are already known to the authorities.

A new report has highlighted the case of a young person who was charged with “kicking council trees”, while children’s panels in pilot areas have also seen young people referred for “pushing someone back with a finger” and “flicking a towel at somebody”.

The interim report on the fast-track hearings experiment says: “The persistent offenders included a much higher proportion living in a residential establishment”, and reveals that 28% of persistent offenders were from a care background compared with 3% of other offenders.

Fast-track pilots began last February with total Executive funding of £4.9m in six local authority areas: Dundee City; Scottish Borders; East Lothian and East, North and South Ayrshire. With additional funding and support, key agencies dealing with young people have been attempting to fast-track persistent youth offenders — those with five or more referrals in a period of six months.

The report has led to calls for an investigation into why, when only one in 100 children are in care in Scotland, they make up one in three of the persistent offenders being referred to children’s panels . While there is some evidence that young people looked after by councils are more likely to become involved in crime, workers in the sector have warned that homes are often too ready to report them to the police, and often for trivial reasons.

Although the researchers from Glasgow, Stirling and Strathclyde Universities found a great deal of support for the pilots – which were hailed as a success by Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson last week – there is now widespread concern over the singling out of young people in care, and a general bias towards targeting young people with a number of trivial offences.

Researchers found that fast-track was seen as prioritising those with multiple minor offences, not serious ones. “It was argued that including such behaviour in fast-track wasted staff time,” the report notes.

Malcolm Hill, lead researcher for the study, which was commissioned by the Executive, said incidents such as the child charged with kicking a tree were genuine. “I don’t think all the offences were minor, but because the criteria for involvement in the fast-track system was persistent offending, you could get someone in the system with lots of trivial offences. “Some people might say that was inappropriate because you might miss out someone with very serious offences.”

He said it was unclear why young people in care were coming through in such numbers. “Some have no previous history of offending, but one of the reasons young people get put into residential placements and schools can be because they are persistent offenders.”

Aileen Hemming is chair of the Borders children’s panel. She said the pilot was working well in general, and demonstrated how effective the children’s panel system could be at getting young people to face up to their offending early on, if the proper resources were made available.

However, there was a concern about the number of trivial offences being reported against children in care. “For some of the incidents you have to ask whether they would ever be reported to the police if they occurred in a family home. Children seem to be being propelled into fast-track simply because they are in residential care.

“There is a real issue about ‘persistency’ versus ‘seriousness’ of offending.”

One senior worker in the residential childcare sector said the labelling of children as fast-track offenders was in danger of becoming a self- fulfilling prophecy. “Some residential staff are calling the police for trivial reasons. Staff are under-resourced and poorly trained. Almost anyone will do and the kids know it. If anything happens, staff just call the police.

“Once you make services and resources available to persistent young offenders, you have an incentive to create them. If the police are getting frustrated with a young tearaway who only has four offences, they will manufacture a charge for dropping litter or obstructing the police. Then the Executive is surprised when there seem to be more persistent offenders.”

Deirdre Watson, director of Who Cares?, the charity for young people in residential care, said workers were monitoring the experiences of children on the receiving end of fast-track hearings. “The fast-track pilots are a good idea, with a huge reservation,” she said. “All young people should be getting this kind of attention anyway. But it does seem to target young people who are already in residential units. Some young people who haven’t offended before going into care tend to pick up offences. Often they are trivial and arise because of the situations they find themselves in. There are a small number of young people who commit a large number of offences and a high proportion of those are to be young people in care. But they may be targeting the wrong young people. If someone is kicking a tree, should you really see that person as an offender?”

David Smith, of Edinburgh’s Centre for Law and Society, said that the fast-track hearing pilots were part of a policy package which appeared to run counter to the aims of the children’s hearing system. “This is in conflict with the general philosophy of the hearing system which is roughly that we should treat young people as being children in need of help, support, care and control rather than as adults who need to be punished for doing things that are wrong.”

The Edinburgh study of youth transitions, based at the centre, also showed that only a minority of young offenders were being picked up by the system, he said. “Our research suggests that only a subset of frequent offenders are captured by the system, what you might call the ‘usual suspects’. People in residential care are obviously going to be targets for intervention in all sorts of ways. Once people are captured by the system, they tend to get into trouble again and again. Such schemes are not, in practice, targeting a group which is incontrovertibly more troublesome and difficult than the young people who are not coming within its scope.”
 

12 January 2004
By Stephen Naysmith, Social Affairs Correspondent, Sunday Herald

 

http://www.sundayherald.com/39206

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