Trauma-informed practice in youth justice is becoming more and more influential as a way of responding to the needs of young people who've suffered a variety of adverse childhood experiences. It seeks to understand negative life experiences as precursors or contributors to behaviours that often marginalise or criminalise. It's based on a growing body of evidence that shows how things like neglect, abuse and brain injury combine with lack of opportunity to limit life chances and make anti-social responses, if not inevitable, then certainly unsurprising.
Trauma-informed practice can also balance the tendency of criminal justice processes to overwhelm and forget both the child and the practitioner at the centre of the case.
This is the first of a multi-part post that will look at how YJB Cymru has been working with youth justice services to see if this approach can enhance case management in the youth justice system in England and Wales.
In this series, I'll look at:
In this series, I'll look at:
- the evidence and analysis that led us to look for a new approach to working with young people who offend
- how we went about designing, funding and mobilising our test of an enhanced case management approach
- a bit more detail on the theory and research behind trauma-informed care and a look at the model we chose to adopt
- how the approach works in practice
- the interim findings from the independent evaluation, and finally
- a guest blog from Dr Diana Johns on her follow up study of the original 117 young people whose stories started our search for a new way of working with them
Success, thicker soup and a cohort study
The story of the youth justice system in England and Wales over the past 16 years is one of success. We've seen an increasingly skilled and professional workforce, alongside significantly decreased numbers of children being drawn into crime.
The growth of multi-agency youth offending teams has also been accompanied - particularly in Wales - by a specific focus on treating young people as children first and offenders second. We have taken to heart article 3 of the UNCRC which asks services to pursue the best interests of children in whatever they do. Our youth justice system pays as much attention to the prevention of offending in the first place as on helping those who've offended overcome their conflict with the law.
The growth of multi-agency youth offending teams has also been accompanied - particularly in Wales - by a specific focus on treating young people as children first and offenders second. We have taken to heart article 3 of the UNCRC which asks services to pursue the best interests of children in whatever they do. Our youth justice system pays as much attention to the prevention of offending in the first place as on helping those who've offended overcome their conflict with the law.
In the early days, efforts were put mainly into developing partnership approaches to targeted youth crime prevention. Things like Youth Inclusion Projects and Youth Inclusion and Support Panels targeted young people at risk of arrest. They asked local agencies to work together and identify young people who had the kinds of challenges in life linked to the onset of offending.
For example, the way to get one of the limited places on the youth inclusion project I managed as part of the YOT in Swansea was to have at least two local agencies refer you. Because our staff were seen as being able to stick with the kids other people couldn't handle, places on the YIP were highly sought after by our partners - and by the young people who went on to refer themselves and their peers.
Joint agency referral brought together some unlikely alliances between 'auld foes'. I remember, at one of our meetings, a detached youth worker sidling up to the local copper to encourage a joint referral. This was a young person they both knew and they both cared about his future.
While it's pretty commonplace now for police to have this kind of conversation, it really wasn't then. These were the days of the 'offences brought to justice' target when it seemed we in the YOT world were seen as apologists for juvenile criminality.
On the other hand, professionals from informal education, youth and social work, often saw us as in cahoots with enforcement agencies - people who misrepresented youthful exuberance as criminal intent.
Despite understandable fears these programmes might 'net widen' and draw more young people into crime and a criminal record - both devastating for life chances - we didn't see this. Rather, there developed a shared determination between police, YOTs and wider partners to keep children away from formal criminal justice. This was followed by the first major decline in the number of first time entrants to the youth justice system.
The next phase of prevention in Wales was a natural development of this. First in Swansea and Cardiff and then everywhere in Wales, we saw the growth of diversion schemes where police and YOTs work together to intervene if a child does get arrested. The youth bureau and triage schemes provide restorative and welfare based alternatives to police charging. Rather than poor behaviour leading to a criminal record, young people arrested for a first or minor offence get a bit of extra help.
The establishment of targeted prevention and then post-arrest diversion coincided with an 84% reduction in first time entrants between 2008 and 2015.
And what happens when you reduce the flow into the system? Over the same period the number of children and young people from Wales who are locked up plummeted too. Between 2008 and 2015 the average number of young people from Wales in custody fell by 75%.
Profiling the 'thickening of the soup'
Meanwhile, not everything in the statistical garden was so rosy. Reoffending rates were on the rise. Politicians and journalists were consistently overlooking the good news about less criminalisation and the financial benefits of lower custody numbers and focussed instead on higher reoffending.
These days it's a bit of a truism to say that the reoffending cohort is made up of the more complex, harder to reach young people. Back in 2010, when Welsh YOT managers first started to talk about the 'thicker soup' it was quite a novel concept; as well being quite an unsavoury metaphor!
Their theory ran that, when you take out all those first timers, the young people left are inherently the hardest to help. Inevitably they will be the most likely to reoffend.
It sounded plausible. So, we set out to do a comprehensive a study of Welsh young people who offend.
We identified a cohort of young people, supervised by YOTs during 2009 who had each accrued at least 25 convictions and who were re-convicted in 2010. This was chosen because an earlier Home Office commissioned piece of work had suggested that getting to 25 convictions was a pretty robust predictor of long term life course offending as an adult.
Criminogenic factors
In Wales, in that year, there were 303 young people with this level of persistent offending. The first phase of the study was a desktop exercise that looked at the nature, onset, frequency and severity of offending; as well as demographic factors like age, gender and race.
So far, so unsurprising. We expected there to be a high reoffending rate among these young people and we knew that, in Wales at least, there would be relatively few of them from black or other minority ethnic groups. Also, as our selection criterion was based around a high number of reconvictions, we were not shocked to learn that the vast majority were in their late teens.
What was interesting, however, was what the information revealed about geographic spread as well as the type and gravity of offences. Across the 22 local authorities in Wales, our cohort made up an average of 4% of all young people who reoffended that year. We expected that the average for rural local authorities would be lower than this and in urban areas, quite a bit higher.
But the figures didn't really support this assumption. When we looked at population density as a measure of rurality, there was a remarkable similarity between the sparsely and densely populated areas. Sure enough, the six least densely populated authorities came in below the national average at 3.5% but so did the six densest at 3.5%. Scattered amongst these were outliers: within the sparse group we had one authority at 6.1% and in the dense group, one at 1.3%.
But the figures didn't really support this assumption. When we looked at population density as a measure of rurality, there was a remarkable similarity between the sparsely and densely populated areas. Sure enough, the six least densely populated authorities came in below the national average at 3.5% but so did the six densest at 3.5%. Scattered amongst these were outliers: within the sparse group we had one authority at 6.1% and in the dense group, one at 1.3%.
In terms of type and seriousness of offending, the figures were equally intriguing. Again, counter-intuitively, while there was a certain amount of serious offending, these kids were predominantly committing lower level offences.
173 (57%) of the 303 entered this group with an index offence not dissimilar to the kinds of things first time entrants get up to - things like public order, criminal damage and theft. Only 40 (13%) joined the cohort committing the most serious offences, like burglary, serious violence and robbery.
Welfare factors
However, useful and interesting these data were, this first phase didn't give a picture of the young people as fully rounded individuals. We knew that they'd offended a lot, what kinds of things they'd done and where. But not why. To get to this, we knew we had to dig a lot deeper.
So we turned to the people that worked with them. The folk who'd carried out detailed first hand research through doing assessments and forming relationships. In doing this, a lot of valuable qualitative information had been recorded on YOT management information systems. We needed to get to this rich source of information and it had to be done, in person, by our staff, sitting down with practitioners in Welsh YOTs.
A large sample (n117) of the 303 was matched through the Police National Computer number to case files in 10 of the 18 YOTs.
We looked at 112 lines of enquiry for each case, taking quantitative and qualitative information from the Asset assessments across domains that related to 'welfare' such as living arrangements, social services, health and family relationships.
This was where the really useful stuff started to come out. Sure, on the outside, many of these young people might look like the tabloid archetype of 'thuggish hoodies'. But when you start to scratch below the surface, a picture emerges of a very vulnerable, complex and generally mixed up bunch of kids who'd experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences. A very quick trot through a few of the Asset domains with a smattering of findings from each is enough to illustrate this:
Family and Personal Relationships
- 58% had contact with offending family members
- 72% had family members abusing alcohol, drugs or solvents
- 42% had experienced significant bereavement or loss
- 38% were identified as having special educational needs
- 41% were not currently engaged in any learning or employment
- 62% were currently suffering feelings of anxiety, stress, sadness or frustration
- 57% had previously had referrals to mental health services
- 10% had a formal diagnosis of mental illness
- 30% with other emotional or psychological difficulties - like eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder or suicidal thoughts
- 79% with referrals to social services
- 45% at some point on a Section 20 voluntary care agreement
- 13% subject to a Section 31 care order
- 41% were or had been on the child protection register
Towards enhanced case management
We are very used to the young people in our system being described as having 'chaotic lives'. I'm not particularly fond of this description. I think it puts incipient blame on them for the chaotic worlds they are forced to inhabit. Nevertheless, we had moved beyond the anecdotal and were now armed with a new and powerful body of evidence.
It seemed that existing approaches for working with young people in the youth justice system were working well for most - evidenced by the vastly decreased numbers in the court cohort - they just weren't cutting it for these more complex and troubled kids.
We'd confirmed the YOT managers' 'thicker soup' theory and now we needed to work with them to create a way of responding to it.
In my next post I'll describe how we went about finding the ideas and the money to do this.
No comments:
Post a Comment