Trauma-Informed Youth Justice Part 1: Evidence, Analysis and the Enhanced Case Management Approach

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:

• 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. 

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%.

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

Education, Training and Employment

• 38% were identified as having special educational needs
• 41% were not currently engaged in any learning or employment

Emotional and Mental Health

• 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

Contact with social services

• 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.

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My youth work story - how this mixed up kid found a purpose

For the last few days, as part of Youth Work Week in Wales, we in @YJBCymru have been sharing quotes from youth workers in youth justice services. We wanted to show how youth workers make a difference to the lives of some of our most vulnerable children.

This has prompted me to share more widely how I came to youth work and where it's led me since - still, I hope, with a youth work ethos; still making a difference.

About 15 years ago I was in a pretty mixed up place. I'd decided being an academic wasn't for me, dropped out of a PhD and spent a couple of years self-employed as a building contractor.

It was pretty ironic that I'd left education and gone back to a skill I'd learned with my dad to make a living, because he always told me a degree would be 'something to fall back on'. Academia didn't suit me though.

While the PhD in Political Philosophy (which was a postmodern critique of liberalists like John Rawls) meant I'd lost contact with the 'real world' - too much thinking and not enough action - the world I'd returned to, the career my father had always encouraged me to aspire beyond, was too much action and not enough thinking.

I gradually found myself feeling less and less happy with work and eventually, at the point where I was sitting in my van outside a supermarket scoffing pumpkin muffins, trying to find reasons for not starting the next job - I had to admit something needed to change. But what to do?

My stroke of luck was that one of my closest friends worked as a co-ordinator for volunteer mentors. She ever so delicately suggested that if I needed something to think about, something to focus on, I might try helping someone else. It might be better than getting all introspective. It felt like she'd given me a bit of a challenge.

So, I found myself sitting nervously with a motley collection of other people of various ages, from all kinds of backgrounds getting induction training on things like child protection, disclosure and confidentiality. I was then assigned a mentee - a young man who was having trouble with substance misuse and was under the supervision of the local youth offending team.

I won't say all my career dilemmas disappeared as such trivia paled into insignificance alongside his much more pressing worries but they were certainly forgotten whenever I was with him. I guess that forming a relationship with him, learning about his life and having nothing more than patience, interest and care to offer was, for me, a form of what we now call mindfulness. When I was with him I couldn't think about anything else.

As a volunteer I was on a mailing list for training and, also being a keen climber, my eye was caught by a weekend course on using the outdoors for youth work. This led to sessional work with Summer Splash; a programme of activities during the school holidays, targeted at areas of high deprivation and high crime. Funnily enough my first paid job as a youth worker was funded by this strange sounding organisation - the Youth Justice Board.

Being part of the team for a residential camping trip to the Gower really made everything click into place. I found myself using all the seemingly random skills and abilities I'd picked up over the years to work with young people. All those thinking skills I'd learned as a student seemed to combine with my love of the outdoors and my ability to make things. I designed and made outdoor games - like a giant ball-in-a-maze game where 4 young people had to cooperate in getting a golf ball from one end of a 4'x8' sheet of plywood to the other. I planned barbeques and helped out on the abseiling. I played guitar round the camp fire. And I stayed up half the night persuading some of the 'hardest' lads in the city to give it another day and see if they could get used to the creepy night noises. It was exhausting but more rewarding than anything I'd experienced before.

From there I got a part time job as a detached youth worker, enrolled on the youth and community work course before joining the local YOT as a support worker with the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme. I joined the ranks of youth workers who are in most every youth offending team and part of the wider community of people who work in a targeted way with young people who find it hard to fit in - who aren't natural 'joiners'. They're the kind of young people who don't naturally go to a youth club or find themselves excluded from group activities.

Over the years, I've moved away from direct work with young people, through service management and getting involved in policy formation. At every stage, though, the main aim has been focussing on relationships and trying to make a difference. Now, having responsibility for some of the most vulnerable young people - those held in custody - I actually feel like I do more direct work with young people than at other points in my career, such as when I was managing other youth workers.

There are around 40 young people from Wales in Custody and we have space for 70 young people in Welsh custodial establishments. I and my team have to make decisions about where they are placed and make judgements about how our providers are meeting their needs. I still try to keep the youth work principles I learned at the centre of how I do my work today. There aren't many of these young people, so I know a lot of their names and I get to meet a fair few of them. And whenever I do, I get that same experience of forgetting my day to day worries and trivia by concentrating on their lives, their aspirations and their voices.

That's why I still love youth work and why this week of celebration has reminded me why I'm in this job.

A Friendly Face: Video conferencing using Skype to keep in touch with children in custody

At 18, going off to college was exciting but it was also pretty scary. A new town 200 miles from home. A bed in unseen university accommodation. New people to meet from all over the country. A new set of rules and routines never experienced before. My dad's car packed with reminders of home - posters, photographs, possessions and presents given by relatives for this new stage in my life.

My family tried to make the transition from home to college as gentle as they could. They understood our attachment now had to stretch halfway across the country; to help me feel as safe in my new environment as I did at home. Even though we joked about the bin liners of washing that accompanied me along the Heart of Wales line back to Cheshire, mum and I knew the frequent trips home were more about easing me gently into my new life, rather than my delight in the smell of freshly laundered clothes.

Gradually and comfortably, my new identity as a student and independent householder took over from that of a schoolboy and son; but always in the knowledge that whenever there was a crisis or even just a yearning for mum's stew, I could hop on a slow train home.

Contrast this with the shock of being a 16 year old in prison for the first time. All the fear, none of the excitement. Cut off from family and friends. A very different journey in a cellular vehicle. No choice about what you take with you, no mum, no dad, no reminders of home. No way to go back and see familiar faces.

Quite right, you may think. They deserve to be punished.

But apart from the punishment they get at the hands of the state - because simple deprivation of liberty is a punishment, no matter what nonsense you may hear about prison being a cushy option - the majority of the young people we see behind bars have already been punished by the hand life has dealt them.

A comfortable and stable home life does not generally pave the way to prison. Our young people tend to come from backgrounds of poverty, deprivation and a context where even the best and most earnest parenting struggles to make headway. Often, though, they've suffered abuse, neglect and trauma. But because they lack attachment, they crave stability. So they miss their friends and families deeply. Being removed from them just increases anxiety and deepens alienation.

When I joined the YJB in 2005 there was an average of 151 young people from Wales in custody, last year it was just 42 (click to Tweet). Thanks to these huge reductions in numbers, we've decommissioned many units. While it's great that we've been able to do this, it does mean when we place young people in custody we have limited options. Young people are often placed a long way from home; usually because there's no local facility but also, we try to match children to places that have the best chance of meeting their needs.

But this does make it harder and harder for families, as well as support workers to visit. Although most are placed within about 50 miles from home - and that's not exactly round the corner - it's not uncommon for young people to be placed upwards of 200 miles away. Even when secure units are relatively close by, it takes a chunk of time to go through security processes and gain entry. So a round trip of twenty miles can easily turn into a half day commitment for a parent or a worker who may need to see a child for just a 30 minute check in.

Good for HRH Wales, good for Welsh kids inside

These days, when our kids go away travelling far from home, how do we keep in touch? Increasingly, we turn to social media and technology like FaceTime, Hangouts or Skype. It means that even though our children are far away we can see their faces, hear their voices and feel they're closer at hand. Well, if it makes sense for us, what aout the parents and carers of children in custody. Simple eh?

Not so simple.

It started well. We checked there was Ministerial support for this kind of thing - there was!

We got in touch with our providers at Parc YOI where there's a 64 bed unit for young people under 18 and asked if they'd be up for trying this out. Sure, they said, that would be really good - particularly for the English boys; their families and workers really struggle with distance.

Next, we asked if colleagues from the Welsh Centre for Crime and Social Justice and Swansea University would help us measure success. Absolutely! In fact, they had a post-graduate looking for a dissertation topic and this would be ideal. As they always are, our academic friends were very focused on making sure we had a tight specification and sharp 'research question'.

So, we thought we had a pretty robust plan.

You may recall that the Prime Minister recently bemoaned the welter of security rules that prison governors have to contend with. If, as he said, there are rules that govern how many pairs of underpants a prisoner can have - imagine what we faced when we suggested Skype might be a good idea.

The first excuse - sorry, reason - from the opposition was that this was a huge security threat. Conversations went something like this:

Guardian of Security: What if they planned a breakout?

Us: That could happen on a phone now, but we'll make sure the call's monitored.

GoS: The connection wouldn't be secure - the encryption's not strong enough.

Us: Phone connections aren't encrypted at all, you don't mind that.

GoS: How will we know the person on the other end is who they say they are?

Us: Isn't that harder to know on a phone call? After all, at least we'll see them. Anyway, we told you they'll have to show ID on the screen.

GoS: What if the person on the other end does something inappropriate?

Us: Er . . . OK . . . You do realise they'll just be talking to their families and workers, right? Anyway, we did tell you there'll be an officer monitoring the calls. they can switch it off if it gets too steamy!

GoS: What if parents just use this instead of doing proper visits?

Us: Now you're worried about welfare? Really? OK, we don't think that'll happen, but this is a test, so we'll have to see won't we?

Minister: Just go away and get on with it!

So away we went and get on with it we did. The staff in Parc set up the equipment and we helped with information for the young people, staff and families. Time to wait for the requests to come rolling in.

Except they didn't. 

It seems even young people, for all their flexibility, adaptability and spirit of adventure need a prod to try something new. And then there were the YOT staff who needed to be persuaded. And once they were persuaded, lots of them had to re-run various versions of our battle of wills with their IT departments who had even more security concerns than at our end!

Finally though, after a few focus groups with the young people and encouraging conversations with senior local authority folk, the first calls happened. And straight away we started to see what we in the trade call benefits.

20 minutes on Skype or a day in the car? You decide . . .

Let's start with practitioners. The time and cost savings for YOT staff and allied professionals for routine visits were immediatley obvious. One practitioner I've spoken to was close to joyful when she told me how much of a busy working day she won back; just by being able to spend 20 minutes on Skype to check in with a boy rather than half a day in her car. Another, a careers worker, told us how much of a head start another young man had when he was released because they'd already met on Skype. It made such a difference when the lad recognised a friendly face at his first appointment outside. 

However, some of the most meaningful and potentially beneficial contacts, in terms of maintaining attachment, have been with families.

There was the boy who hadn't seen his mum for nearly a year because she was in a care home following illness. A member of my staff (yes the YJB works with real people now and then) met up with Dad on the community end, to show him how to set up a Skype account and accompany him into the home so there could be a tearful reunion via tablet. On the Parc end, the fantastic and tenacious Skype champion Wayne made sure there was someone on hand to deal with any emotional fallout.

Another lad hadn't been able to see his young relatives because, understandably, the family didn't want to expose them to the prison environment on a physical visit. And in any case, he didn't want them to know he wasn't really 'working away'.

Another was able to have a virtual tour of the new house his mum had moved to while he was inside. Knowing what his new bedroom 188 miles away would look like when he got out must have gone a long way to reducing the pre-release nerves young people tell us they get when they're due to come out.

So, at the end of our pilot there have been enough calls to know that there's an appetite for more. There have been no security breaches. The calls have not replaced in-person visits - they've added to them. 

The evaluation interviews with participants show that the service is valued by practitioners, families and young people. The secure unit is keen to continue and we're keen to roll out across the rest of the estate. 

Most importantly we've been able to help preserve an emotional attachment between some very vulnerable children and the people who need to be there to help them stay away from trouble 'on the out'.

There have been challenges along the way - some technical glitches when wifi signals have been a bit weak on the external end - but the biggest obstacle has been preconceptions about security. These can be overcome though. We've since found out there's a similar set up - the Juvenile Justice Video Conferencing Program in California's Santa Clara Superior Court. And, after all, I guess there were some pretty heated discussions about the introduction of the telephones into our prisons a few generations ago but we got there in the end.