Steering children away from violence

At a seminar hosted by children's charity NCH today, experts will consider how to help the small number of disturbed children who may commit extreme violence, like the killers of James Bulger. Such children are often shunned but can be helped.

Children who have committed grave crimes, or even those who threaten to do so, cause society to be frightened and angry. Every parent will identify with the sense of unease experienced when a troublesome child enters the neighbourhood. The over-whelming instinct is to protect your children by separating them from the other child, even if your conscience tells you otherwise. Yet it is this sense of being separate from others that appears to be one of the most important factors in fuelling a child towards violence. For many of these children the very essence of being human - a warm responsive relationship with particular adults - is missing from the beginning of their lives. There is evidence that biological factors do predispose children to difficult behaviour, but there is also evidence that appropriate care at an early age is important in setting children off on a pathway that leads to resilience. In order to form a secure attachment to their child a parent will need to be available, dependable and benevolent. Indeed an ongoing lack of these elements in the early years can in itself threaten brain development and growth.

At one level, the reasons for violence seem very simple and so the solutions easy to define (if a child has been abused or neglected they make up for this). They also seem frightening in that the absence of something that is so taken for granted, good parental care, can lead to such poor outcomes. However the pathways to violence are indeed more complex.

So in some cases things go very wrong. The result is a group of children who cannot be placed in the company of others because of the danger they pose. It is not necessarily anyone's fault, but picking up the pieces and changing the trajectory is clearly a terrific challenge. The important thing is that people can be diverted enough to make it worth the effort of trying.

However, these children are generally adolescents before their behaviour is serious enough to force a professional response. Often by this time professionals have a limited choice of placement and the onus tends to be on protecting others by separating the individual from them and if the law is involved, punishment. Yet an equally important element of the response has to be an intervention that attempts to address some of the root causes for the behaviour. This is difficult especially when the adolescent is unwilling to engage and often positively hostile.

Services for these challenging children tend to remain disparate and reactive rather than matched to need. The reasons for this are understandable. The actual number of children who pose a high risk to other children, and who are in the care of local services, is small. This combines with the wide variation in their needs, and the enormous cost of doing it properly.

What is needed is agreement that we will invest in this group, not just to keep them out of sight, but to try to intervene where possible. Services have to be multi-agency and responsive to the needs of the "whole" child. This means that services work together with the individual child, the family and the community contexts in which they live, for example the school and the child's peers, and that attention to problems is immediate.

In some cases interventions will not work. A significant proportion of these children will always have severe problems, and there seem to be issues in acknowledging this, yet still finding ways to "hold" those children, and to meet their human rights, rights that are not forfeited because of the risks the children pose.

If the child is thought to be too dangerous to allow to freely wander then the following considerations become pertinent:

The child is likely to want to feel secure. This is in relation to a long-term plan and also to physical boundaries in relation to adults being in control and sometimes even physical barriers to absconding or contact with inappropriate friends;
the child should continue to receive an education;
qualified staff should oversee a treatment programme;
have a range of provision. It may be necessary for some adolescents to be kept in secure accommodation but others may benefit from specialist foster care;
even when incarcerated in prison remember that these adolescents will also have the needs of others of a similar age for nurturing and care;
even if there are no facilities that offer treatment, remember that these adolescents will need to be somewhere where they feel secure. They may be boys, (as they often are) who are hard to control and presenting as bad but often it is the element of sadness in their lives that is fuelling their behaviour. Remember what sad children need and attempt to provide it;
respect and reward staff. Working with these children needs patience and expertise, and you need to keep your staff in post.

Extracted from: Children Who Commit Acts of Serious Interpersonal Violence: Messages For Best Practice (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book.php/isbn/9781843103844

Renuka Jeyarajah Dent and Ann Hagell
30 November 2006

http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,1959902,00.html

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