youth

From Care to Career – Shabnam & Wunderman Thompson

“I was in Care due to family problems and was taken into care by my local authority. Everyone’s experience of being in care is so different – if I could summarise it to you in one sentence it’s sometimes a safe haven for some young people who go into a home and share the space with a loving caring family or it can be the most traumatic experience having to share a house with 12 to 20 or sometimes even more young people who are going through their hardest stage of life – where pain, anger, lost, abandonment feelings are visibly everywhere. Every care experienced young persons experience is different therefore it’s hard to describe what’s it like being in care.”

What barristers can do to help decriminalise care

Half of the children detained in Youth Offending Institutes are, or have been, in the care system. That’s despite the fact that children in care make up less than one percent of the child population. Research conducted by the Howard League for Penal Reform has found that unnecessary police call-outs and mental health difficulties are two of the main factors behind this statistic.

Prevention is better than the cure, and our Policy Forum’s criminalisation subgroup has mainly focused on how we can avoid children in care coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place. The group has worked extensively with the Metropolitan Police and the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime on ways to achieve this. Forcing carers, social workers and other agents to ask themselves the question ‘Would this be good enough for my child’, our young people helped to write a protocol, released in March this year, aimed at keeping police call-outs as a last resort.

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