Task force to study services offered to young offenders

The Children’s Commissioner will be heading a task force that will take stock of the services offered to young offenders and come up with ways to ensure a more holistic approach.

The task force, made up of representatives of various ministries, will go through a series of recommendations made recently by an inquiry board tasked with looking into the case of two troubled children who were denied bail over the alleged theft of €400.

The recommendations include the need to overhaul the juvenile justice system with reforms in the police, the courts, prison and even NGOs dealing with young people.

The report, commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner last August, said incarceration should be the very last resort and the government should ensure there were a range of options to imprisonment, such as therapeutic facilities and secure homes.

The task force would draw up a plan to implement the recommendations that fit into the holistic vision for the services in the long and short term, Children’s Commissioner Helen D’Amato said.

Although there was no date set for the first meeting, since the Family Ministry representatives still had to be nominated, this should happen shortly, she said.

Ms D’Amato stressed the inquiry report did not say all services being offered were ineffective. “It merely spoke about taking stock of strengths and addressing weaknesses,” she said, adding she did not want to discourage those who worked so hard in the interest of minors.

As highlighted by the report, there was need to ensure whoever dealt with young offenders were trained and that social workers were present when such offenders were speaking to the police or lawyers, Ms D’Amato said.

She said the government ought to know what was going on within NGOs and ensure standards were maintained.

The inquiry report, authored by lecturers Andrew Azzopardi and Lara Tonna and lawyer Monica Borg Galea, was critical of services already offered by NGOs and called for them to be reviewed or discontinued.

It painted a picture of stretched organisations and spoke about the enormous case workload at the government’s support agency, Appoġġ. It said the agency lacked an efficient 24-hour emergency service. (Questions sent to the agency remained unanswered at the time of writing.)

The report also spoke about YMCA Homeless and said it had to improve therapeutic services, recreational space and sanitary conditions. There was also need for more staff training and to improve the staff-to-client ratio.

YMCA chairman Jean Paul Mifsud said his organisation was aware of the issues raised as they had also been listed in a report it compiled last June and presented to the relevant authorities. The problem boiled down to lack of funds, available services across the board and resources, he said.

He pointed out that YMCA offered a home to those minors who were mostly rejected by other services because they had behavioural or substance abuse problems or were victims of severe abuse amongst others. Over the past three years 104 children had been referred to YMCA.

He pointed out it was YMCA that had exerted pressure for an investigation into the arrest of the two children be held through awareness it raised at the time.

Although, through the published recommendations, the inquiry seemed to have brushed over the specifics of what went wrong in the case of the particular children, YMCA welcomed the recommendations put forward and hoped these would be implemented with urgency and not remain on paper, he said.

The case of the two minors, a 15-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, had made headlines when they were denied bail and sent to Corradino Correctional Facility after being charged with stealing €400 from their uncle.

An appeal was successfully filed by Appoġġ, which was legally responsible for the children, who were under care orders because they came from a background of neglect and abuse. The court decision came under fire from practitioners in the field, who argued the minors’ rights had been trampled.

Let’s work together

Young offenders are slipping through the system because there is lack of coordination between different entities that should work together to help minors get onto the right track, according to a lecturer in youth studies.

Andrew Azzopardi, who specialises in social inclusion, is concerned there is lack of direction and coordination between the various entities dealing with juvenile delinquents.

His concerns echo a series of wide-ranging recommendations made by an inquiry board, which he chaired, tasked with looking into a case where two troubled children were denied bail over the alleged theft of €400.

While preferring not to delve into the merits of the full report, for confidentiality issues, he said through his line of work he had noticed gaps in the system he felt had to be addressed by a centralised entity like the Children’s Commissioner.

The main problem is that various entities, that include the police, Appoġġ and NGOs, are working independently of each other.

“We have a group of children and young people who are slipping through the system... We are not working with these children, we are trying to contain them and that does not work. These children need support and therapy,” he said.

He gave the example of a youngster who is caught vandalising something and is then taken to a police station where officers are not trained to deal with young offenders.

From this stage there is already a system vacuum that allows the police to be immediately aware if a child is on care order.

If the teenager was taken to court, there were problems with legal aid lawyers who were not trained to handle such cases and the law did not oblige a social worker to be present, he said.

The juvenile court deals with minors under 16 but, the way the law is, if a minor is accused together with another person over 16 both cases are heard as adults.

Once the youngster is charged there is the issue of bail. Mr Azzopardi believes bail should always be granted to minors – that should be considered as those under 18 – unless it is a very serious crime.

If, for some exceptional reason, bail had to be denied then the minor should never end up in jail but there should be an alternative system or residential therapeutic service to help such minors.

Another problem is that magistrates do not have enough tools like widespread community services. Listing the range of issues that had to be tackled, Dr Azzopardi stressed on the need to include these minors for the benefit of society. If such young people were just allowed to slip through the support network, they will be a burden on society in future.

“Their only blame is because they’re unlucky... These children are the result of the social conditions they are brought up in. With different social conditions, except for a few who are pathologically sick, things can change,” he said.