Children’s Commissioner calls for radical ‘Scandinavian-style’ reforms to youth justice

A new report from the Children’s Commissioner for England urges Government to put more resource into stopping gangs from exploiting vulnerable children and reducing the numbers of children in custody to an absolute minimum – as well as transforming secure care for children so that rehabilitation is at its heart.

Over the last decade the number of children receiving a caution or sentence has fallen by 83% and the number of children in custody has fallen by 73%.

The report questions why, however, there are still hundreds of children ending up in our courts and prisons when, by comparison in 2015, there were only 13 children aged 15-17 in prison in the whole of Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Denmark combined. In England, 7 in 10 children released from custody reoffend within a year.

The report warns that an under-resourced and fragmented system of child protection is letting down thousands of children before they ever set foot inside a police station. It shows how over half of children sentenced are currently or have already been a ‘Child in Need’, 7 in 10 have identified mental health needs and 85% of boys in young offender institutions have previously been excluded from school. When compared to their peers, children in residential care are at least 13 times more likely to be criminalised.

The Children’s Commissioner argues in the report that at every stage of a child’s journey through the criminal justice system, opportunities are being missed to get to the root causes of offending and that the system is failing to see the child first and the ‘offender’ second, reducing the opportunity for real change. This appears to be particularly true for Black children, who are over four times more likely to be arrested than White children. Despite accounting for only 18% of the general population, children from BAME backgrounds now make up almost half (49%) of the entire population of youth custody.

The report makes a number of recommendations for building on the gains of recent years, to further reduce the numbers of children going into custody including a ‘significant expansion’ of early help services, reform of the Alternative Provision sector, and raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 years old, in line with the recommendations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, said: “For too long, ruthless criminals have been able to exploit gaps in the education and child protection system to exploit and criminalise vulnerable children. Tackling the scourge of serious violence requires a radical change in how we view the youth justice system.

“We should look at why Scandinavian countries have so few children in custody and raise our own expectations to match them. That will mean stopping gangs from exploiting vulnerable children, identifying children at risk of getting involved in crime and diverting them away from that path, reducing the numbers of children in custody to an absolute minimum and transforming secure care for children so that rehabilitation is at its heart.”