Care orders will be examined by a task force being set up by the Children’s Commissioner to look into the efficiency of services offered to young offenders.
Commissioner Helen D’Amato said the task force, which she will head, was expected to be set up very soon, possibly by the end of the week, and would include representatives from the ministries of health, education and justice as well as someone from the Office of the Prime Minister.
Apart from looking into the recommendations recently made by an inquiry board on the services offered to juvenile delinquents, the task force will also tackle the issue of care orders that was the subject of another report published last year.
The report, that had been commissioned by former Children’s Commissioner Carmen Zammit, followed an 18-month inquiry after a child who suffered from severe abuse was sent back to live with his mother despite a care order when no children’s homes accepted him because of behavioural problems. The report had said this was “unacceptable” and the opening of other homes, to cater for such children, was “indispensable”.
Young children should not be put in residential homes with older children and children with challenging behaviour should not stay in the same homes as those who are there because of lack of alternative placing, the report recommended.
The report also stressed the need for immediate financial, structural and human investment to protect minors. It said nuns who ran children’s homes were overworked and needed support and assistance.
Sr Jacqueline Jones, a counselling psychologist who works in homes, proposed last year that children’s homes pool their resources and, with the assistance of the government, employ a set of professionals dedicated to provide drama and play therapy and anger management to the children in care.
Sr Jones explained that, although the homes worked with psychologists and social workers from Appoġġ – the government’s social arm, the service was overburdened, which was why a team of professionals had to be dedicated to residential homes.
The workload of social workers at Appoġġ was also highlighted in both the care order report and the report on the services offered to juvenile offenders. Both said the caseload did not allow social workers to build a significant relationship with the minors they dealt with.
The latter report included a series of recommendations such as the need to overhaul the juvenile justice system with reforms in the police, the courts, prison and even NGOs dealing with young people.
Incanceration should be the very last resort and the government should ensure there was a range of options to imprisonment, such as therapeutic facilities and secure homes.
Social workers’ perspective
Social workers who deal with troubled children are worried because their high caseload means they end up focusing their energy on crisis situations but fail to follow up on other young clients in need of support.
“By reducing the caseload, a better service can be offered to the children and young persons. Through this, more intensive work can be carried out with families and more individualised support can be offered throughout the constant direct client contact,” said social worker Anthea Agius.
Ms Agius, president of the Malta Social Workers’ Association, was reacting to the report released by the inquiry board that pointed out the high caseload.
Each social worker deals with about 40 cases when the recommended caseload is of about 10 to 15 children per social worker.
“At present, the high number of caseloads is not allowing the social workers to work intensively and appropriately with all clients... Social workers end up working intensively with a small number of clients due to specific and urgent needs and in times of crisis,” Ms Agius said.
“This means a significant number of children are not followed and only minimal or no work can be done with these children. It is important to note that such children also require constant support as they would otherwise not have been referred and accepted in the first place,” she said.
The result of the caseload, she added, was that social workers had to move from one crisis to another with consequences on the quality of service to the children, higher risk of crisis, lack of preventative work and higher risk of burnout of social workers.
“With the current caseloads social workers may not be able to meet certain clients for periods at times longer than a month,” she said, adding that, as pointed out in the inquiry board’s report, apart from the high caseload, social workers also faced the lack of safe and therapeutic residential facilities for young people.
It is important to have a caring but also “containing” environment for these young people so that the work carried out by social workers is backed up within the residence they are in, she said.