by Chris Durkin
University of Northampton

When I started training to be a social worker in the early 1980s, Radical Non Intervention was a strategy that was still being talked about as a way of tackling the problems associated with certain groups of disaffected and disenfranchised young people. If my memory is correct, this strategy looked at adolescence as a period of transition in which young people were seen, at times, to get into difficulties and the role of parents, teachers, social workers etc, was to help them through this period, recognizing that most people would come through their adolescence unscathed. The main thrust of this argument was that bringing young people into the juvenile justice system would harm them, and that, in actual fact, it would make matters worse by bringing them into contact with hardened criminals, a theory of contamination.

Looking at the current debate about the young of today, I am very concerned about an increasingly contradictory trend. On the one hand we have the Government talking about the need for choice, “…personalisation – so that the system fits to the individual rather than the individual having to fit to the system”(1). On the other hand we see young people being sucked into an overstretched juvenile justice system by the use of Anti Social Behaviour Orders. The trouble, I feel, is that young people are too quickly being labeled as criminals, ignoring the fact they are still children.

The whole essence of the Government’s new much vaunted child care system is, I thought, one of prevention, recognizing at its core an aim that for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, should have the support they need to:

Be healthy,
Stay safe,
Enjoy and achieve,
Make a positive contribution,
Achieve economic well-being.
These five factors are incorporated into all the Government documents affecting children from child care, education to the recently published Every Child Matters(2).

Before he became Prime Minister, Tony Blair talked about being “tough on crime and tough on the causes of the crime”. This was a very interesting and a good sound bite just at a time when the Probation Service was repositioning itself firmly in the criminal justice system away from its roots in social work.

Crime has always been, in part, linked to such issues as deprivation, education and poverty. If we are to address the problems of crime, attention must surely be focused on the causes of crime, which includes improving the communities where people live, but as Claire Tyler, Chief Executive of the Social Exclusion Unit, has rightly pointed out in Delivering for All: Improving Service Delivery for the most Disadvantaged , social care is currently missing from the regeneration jigsaw.

As Lord Victor Adebowale, eloquently said, “Often those who need help the most are the least likely to receive it, and that's not just a problem for the individual. It means that we're getting bad value for money as a society from the services we pay for. We need a new approach that designs and delivers social care around people's complex needs, rather than expecting people to fit neatly into existing services.(3)”

Let us have a debate, but let us not focus solely on the crime but also on the person, and in the case of young people, let us focus on them first as children

(1)Charles Clarke Department for Education and Skills (2004) Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/5yearstrategy/docs/DfES5Yearstrategy.pdf

(2)Every Child Matters: Change for Children see - http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/

(3)See: Delivering for All: Improving Service Delivery for the most Disadvantaged http://www.socialexclusion.gov.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=621