Attend to consciousness, the key factor.

I think it is worthwhile pointing out, as this film will, that it is unhelpful to our children, who will be our nation’s citizens, to exaggerate the scale of problems that they are responsible for.

I would, however, like to take a different approach to that of criticising anyone, including the journalists and the media, and offer proven solutions to the problems that our children are experiencing.

That’s my profession, giving people proven solutions. Or, should I better say, giving people the ability to solve their problems themselves in a more coherent manner. I am a teacher of Transcendental Meditation.
So many problems bearing down on our youngsters and it seems difficult to know where to start in attempting to solve them, particularly if the key problem is generally unknown.

The key problem is one of low levels of consciousness in the individual and in society. That one factor, consciousness, stands at the back of every decision that we make and, if you can change that then behaviour will change automatically. It also, of course, stands at the back of every article that a newspaper publishes.
If there is a good enough quality of technique to swing the individual spontaneously into a more positive pattern of life then all sorts of worthwhile spinoffs occur, both for themselves and people who care about them.

If you had a hand in choosing the benefits of such a turnkey technique would the following feature in your design? These form the outcomes of an initiative using Transcendental Meditation.

• Supportive and complementary to valued interventions currently in use
• Propagating happiness, reducing anxiety and depression, eliminating stress
• Undemanding for the practitioner, not a mental skill that one has to work at, it becomes a very private thing
• Something that the mind will like, and will be encouraged to do again and again
• Definitely not a religion, no belief is required
• Solid body of evidence to check, including case studies, putting it head and shoulders above anything else available

http://www.mum.edu/tm_research/welcome a leading brain researcher speaks

• Not necessary for all to learn as effect spills over onto non-practitioners
• Non-contextual—it will work anywhere in any situation
• Accessible to learn within a few hours
• Convenient to do anywhere.

John Markham
Director for Rehabilitation: Global Country of World Peace (UK)
Maharishi Foundation

The solutions are already out there

The media coverage of the Doncaster boys who abused two other children has drawn vast and varied comment – but most of it has one thing in common - the need to blame. It has to be someone’s fault, the reasoning goes, so let’s find who it is and then we can all rest. Some are blaming the social workers, others the parents, then we have the politicians- they must have something to do with it, or maybe it was the Mayor for appointing a pie man to run its children’s services.

But when the blood letting is over, when anger has subsided, will we be left with a sustained desired to really understand the problem and in doing so find a solution?

Thankfully the media is moving on from simply demonising the two perpetrators of these appalling crimes. There is at last a willingness to ask why did these boys turn out like this? Research is revealing that neglected children have not had the nurturing experiences needed for areas of the brain to develop that enable them to control their emotions and behaviour. But then doesn’t it make sense that if a child is brought up with little care or respect, they may not know how to care or respect others. If they have been treated more like a thing than a human being, it seems fairly obvious that they may have learned to treat others as things rather than human beings. And if they are shouted at, abused, and their feelings ignored, they may become adept at shouting, fighting, abusing and disregarding the feelings of others. A little reflection and a desire to understand leads anyone to these conclusions.

So we trace the problem back one generation, and find that the parents of these anti-social children were neglectful – but then how did the parents become so dysfunctional? If we use the same reasoning we find two grown people who may well have been damaged from their own neglected childhood. It seems to me that if your aim is just to find someone to blame, you will always get the satisfaction you seek. But you may not find the solution. The solution lies in our willingness to understand, and to exercise one or our greatest human assets – empathy. When I worked with children in care 30 years ago, as a residential care worker – at first, try as I might, I couldn’t stop being judgemental of the children’s bad behaviour, until I got to know the home life they had come from – and then I couldn’t help wondering how I would have turned out if I had been through these young peoples experience of life. I thought about it for a while over cups of tea, on long drives or bracing walks and I came to my conclusion: taking into account my ability to get very angry about injustice and any form of parental heavy-handedness, I think my behaviour would have been much worse than the children I was working with. If you were to reflect on this same question, if you were to imagine yourself brought up in a chaotic, neglectful and violent household, how do you think you would have turned out?

Look at the pattern – as a group, offenders have lower literacy levels, and poor mood control leading to anger management problems than the rest of the population. Neglectful upbringing commonly leads to impaired brain functioning that results in poor mood control affecting the ability to concentrate in school, self-modify behaviour or develop empathy – which wrecks the ability to do well in life and have good relationships. Children who suffer abuse or neglect in childhood are more likely to become offenders. Some believe that neglect and abuse damages a child early and permanently. Yes, there are windows of time in our development that are primed for us to absorb deeply and become imprinted by our environment – for good or bad. But research also suggests the brain is much more plastic than we ever thought and has vast capacity to learn, unlearn and move on. Some may need more patience and support than others, but people can move on and grow. It all depends how far we are prepared to go to understand and help those whose life experience has been so much less fortunate than our own. At any point we can fall back on the short-lived satisfaction of judging others or we can take time to reflect a little, try to understand, put ourselves in another’s shoes.

And where will all this compassion lead? There is always the worry that if we reduce in any way the punishment we meter out for criminal behaviour there won’t be any discouragement for crime. But if we really want to cure the problem, perhaps its time to look around and see that we already have some exceptional resources – people Like Camilla Batmanghelidjh, founder of the Kids Company. Or Maura Jackson, who has worked to create turn-around environments to help women reduce re-offending through Home Office initiatives. Or Dan Hughes who has done so much to create successful therapeutic approaches for neglected children. There are other grass roots workers doing exceptional work in Youth Offending teams – like Denbigh in North Wales – or Parent Support Advisors self organising to set up innovative groups to help failing children – like the team in Somerset. Or staff in Family Intervention Projects around the UK. Just browse the coalition members on this site and see how much commitment and compassion there is out there making a difference. Not to mention the innovative prison workers, social workers, chaplains and volunteers who are quietly doing amazing work unknown to the rest of us, day after day helping to turn peoples lives around. There may not presently be enough of these people, but they are there.

If politicians and media focussed their attention on seeking out these innovators in social care and therapeutic interventions, it wouldn’t take too long to find what works and how best to train practitioners in these approaches. The solutions are already out there. Granted, the scale of the problem is large and has probably been steadily building for generations. But the very existence of innovative workers who know how to effect lasting change in people who have been given up on by the rest of society gives us reason to be very optimistic.

Wendy Marshall
Co-founder
Hope Mountain

Why did we commission “the Fear Factory”?

With funding from The Nationwide Foundation, three Third Sector agencies came together to commission this film, Safer Wales Ltd, Construction Youth Trust and Addaction. We all work intensively with young people who are either offenders or at risk of offending, to break the cycles of vulnerabilities, and prevent re-offending.

Frustration with External Factors
We have become, over the past 15 years or so, increasingly frustrated with the external factors which work against us and the young people themselves. In particular with how they are viewed, and treated, both within the criminal justice system, and also to some extent in schools, or in the care system, and in particular by the media, which we feel has a lot to answer for in perpetuating stereotypes and demonising young people, lessening their chances of exiting from the dire circumstances some of them find themselves in.

Wake Up Call – we need a Cross-Party Solution
We want the film, to be a wake-up call – to politicians, colleagues in the Third, Public and Private sectors who work in this field, and to the media. We want to ask you to join this coalition to develop and commit to a realistic and practical way forward on youth justice; and reject a system in which young people and crime are used as pawns to sell papers or to attract votes.

We want all of our politicians to work on a cross-party solution, and deal with the issue with proper long term planning, policy and delivery, and evaluation over a longer period.

Young people are entering the criminal justice system at younger and younger ages. We need to be asking the question why? Where are we failing them so badly that no one seems to be picking up the signs early enough to prevent this?

“Somewhere to go and something to do”
Consultation with young people who are “hanging around” on the streets, consistently shows the same result. They want somewhere to go, and something to do. It’s not rocket science. Too often, the same level of short-sightedness results in money being spent on practical measures that can end up alienating the young people even more – costly resources such as CCTV cameras and alley-gating schemes, please the electorate and meet short term community safety targets, whilst longer term or more creative solutions like more detached youth services and facilities, or, for example, the community (weekend, evening and school holiday) use of schools, are often talked about, but not delivered.

“All I wanted was an adult to talk to......................”
Many agencies in the Third Sector, including Safer Wales, find themselves delivering programmes to prevent “re-offending”, and we know that mentoring or other support schemes, and other interventions – if they are engaged with on a voluntary basis and occur at the right time – can make a huge difference to offending or reoffending behaviour. But the question we should be asking ourselves is why do these schemes need to exist? – Why are these young people getting into offending behaviour in the first place? – How is it that we have not effectively tackled and managed risk factors and vulnerabilities evidenced over 10 years ago - what have we really done to tackle poor literacy, poor parenting, low educational achievement, mental health issues, child abuse and plain old poverty?

Short-termist thinking doesn’t work...
The answer is that much has been done – but most of it in short term bursts, measured over 2 – 3 years. Partly this is because much new work is done with grant funding, which has a shelf life of 3 years at best. Partly, it is to do with performance reporting within agencies and with grant funders; targets (again annual or 2 – 3 year at most, coinciding with the electoral cycles), often related to what both local and national politicians want to demonstrate they have done on crime and disorder, to the electorate. It is also partly to do with the fact that some local CJS partners (the police and the CPS for example) may have centrally set annual targets which pro-actively ensure that more incidents are recorded and more young people are charged, and so, whilst they are all members of crime and disorder partnerships or other statutory partnerships, such as those which concern children and young people, they are constrained in their action, and there is no incentive to undertake things in a different fashion.

These things reflect the fact that no guidance over the past 30 years has taken into account the basic fact that if you want to prevent youth offending, you have to analyse plan and evaluate in a continuous process, long term, at least for a 5 – 10 year period. For example a literacy or vocational skill initiative which is undertaken in one year may support more 13 year olds to stay in school, which could impact on youth offending figures in 5 years time. Practically speaking this is about the years in which a young person may be most vulnerable to criminality – age 10 –20. The wider picture, tackling poverty and poor parenting, health issues etc – starts in early years and could go right through to age 25.

Join the coalition...
We want national and local politicians to work with us on these issues, and not put obstacles in the way; we want national and local media to stop stereotyping and demonising young people.

We need to act on this issue – TOGETHER and NOW – I appeal to my colleagues in the Third sector and elsewhere – sign up to the Coalition, and let’s start getting this right. We are delighted that so many organisations have already signed up to the coalition and hope many more will do the same.

Barbara Natasegara MBE
Chief Executive
Safer Wales Ltd

The Fear Factory Blog

The Fear Factory Blog will feature contributions from coalition members, key stake holders, organsiations and individuals working in the field of youth justice.