SCOTLAND

Solutions do not lie in a return to juvenile courts

THE children's hearing system may well be plunged deeper into crisis by underfunding, and some aspects of it are in need of reform, but it has not failed in the sense suggested by Thomas G Wylie (September 26).

Lord Kilbrandon's patrician sense of what could go wrong in the lives of children was somewhat limited, even by the standards of his time and, like many 1960s reformers, he underestimated the extent to which the behaviour of unruly young people could impair the quality of life in already disadvantaged communities.

But he was not wrong to place the primary emphasis on help and support, and there are good reasons why Scotland's hearing system has enjoyed the esteem of social workers in many western countries whose approach to youth justice switched back to punishment two decades ago, and yet failed abjectly to solve the problem.

Just look south. Help and support does not - or should not - preclude censure and control, and the forms it takes have to adapt to meet the changing, and arguably more challenging, circumstances of contemporary children's lives. It is not in the "interests of the young person" to believe that they can disregard the impact of their behaviour on the localities in which they live, and it is not in the "interests of the community" to aggravate the problem that "kids" represent, though sometimes both sides may need, and deserve, immediate respite from the other.

To some extent this is understood by the children's hearing system and the social work which supports it, but in one respect it seems not to be. The latent animus of some social work interest groups towards the executive's reasonably well-thought-out (if awkwardly packaged) "anti-social behaviour agenda" is misguided.

Only if communities are convinced that something is being done to ameliorate anti-social behaviour will they remain or become tolerant towards the supervision of young offenders among them - otherwise they will understandably demand exclusion and punishment.

Efforts to create safer communities and efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate young offenders should not be seen, culturally or administratively, as separate worlds. If there are solutions to the depredations of young people - and that is a bigger if than many care to think - it lies in the practical, face-to-face work that needs to be done with them and their kin and neighbours in the localities in which they live, and in broader efforts to improve the quality of life in such places.

That includes setting standards of behaviour, and in particular condemning, censuring and sanctioning violence, and generating alternatives to it. It is not just a job for criminal-justice social workers - or alternatively it is an appeal to them to consider involving themselves in a wider range of ways of creating community safety. Solutions do not lie in nostalgic appeals to the pre-Kilbrandon juvenile court, which would in any case be impotent if it were not supported by an infrastructure of supervising social workers, and no better off if that infrastructure continued to isolate itself from new endeavours to create safer communities.

It is, indeed, time to go "beyond Kilbrandon" in Scotland, but with a sense of respect for his aspirations, not a sense that he failed. Some of the bleakness that was coming in the lives of children and young people he could not have anticipated, but his core belief that their lives should be enriched rather than their difficulties and failings compounded was not fundamentally mistaken.

We should thus build on the best of what is already there, adjusting and adding to it to meet the challenge of harsher times and changed expectations, rather than turning the clock back.

Mike Nellis, Professor of Criminal and Community Justice, University of Strathclyde.
28 September 2006

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