Time for a Fresh Start.

Bullock, Roger

Time for a Fresh Start

Independent Commission on Youth Crime and Anti-social Behaviour November 2010

www.youthcrimecommission.org.uk;

A New Response to Youth Crime

David J Smith (ed) Willan Publishing 2010

424 pages 27.50 [pounds sterling]

This Independent Commission's report on youth crime and anti-social behaviour seeks new approaches to dealing with young offenders, arguing that the present system is rigid and ineffective and relies too much on the use of youth custody. The edited volume provides the evidence to support these observations and emerging recommendations.

Both publications are relevant to Adoption & Fostering because they specify foster care as a useful strategy likely to help some young offenders who might otherwise go to residential care or prison custody. On pages 44-45 of the report, there is a discussion of multidimensional treatment foster care (also see Kirton and Thomas, and Westermark et al abstract, p 96, this journal) and its use for adolescents in serious trouble and this is considered in the wider context of reforming the system in the edited volume (p 220).

Several models employing foster care have been developed since the initial project fashioned by the Oregon Social Learning Center and the results have been encouraging. One example provides intensive support for young people with serious behaviour problems by placing them in short-term foster homes while therapeutic work takes place with them and their own families. An evaluation showed that it led to less serious offending and fewer prison sentences when compared with custodial and other community interventions.

In the 1970s in the UK, Nancy Hazel in Kent and service directors in Warwickshire challenged orthodoxy by placing boys and girls in foster care as an alternative to approved (reform) schools, but these innovations tended to wither away. In the last few years, however, there has been renewed interest in these methods and pilot projects have been undertaken. The results of these will show whether this approach is viable, works better than existing responses, and if so, when and for whom. The two initiatives are slightly different as the earlier ones saw fostering as a direct alternative to residential care, whereas the two reports reviewed see fostering as a means of supporting the wider aims of prevention, restoration and integration that are central to the proposed strategy.

For those working in this area or seeking to initiate projects of this kind, these two publications provide the reading necessary to explain why something needs to be done and how specialist fostering fits in with other envisaged responses to young people's difficulties.

Roger Bullock is Commissioning Editor of Adoption & Fostering