Social Work and the Youth Justice System: ensuring social work values

1. Social Work and the Youth Justice System: ensuring social work values Dr Elaine Arnull Bucks New University UK

2. Ensuring social work values • New Labour created YJB (Crime and Disorder Act:1998) and current structure of the YJS and Children Act (2004); • They accepted risk based work which influenced their social policy direction; • Congruent with their Fabian, socialist ideals - seeks to mitigate and counter structural discrimination, embraces conceptions of agency and looks for long-term, welfare based solutions. • Supported their concerns for social cohesion post-Thatcher, notions of a modernised state and conceptions of a need to reinvigorate ‘respect’ for the self and others. • Risk based research provided empirical data that factors could be identified and tackled; said that we could ‘prevent’ harm. • Suggested there were things which were ‘done to’ some c&yp and some for which they were responsible. And that if identified both you might intervene and change the future trajectory for the young person.

3. Ensuring social work values • Criticisms of Modernising agendas such as New Labour’s suggest that our ‘...post-modern, post-industrial, post-traditional’ societies have created technocratic and bureaucratic solutions lacking an ethical dimension and becoming irrational processes. • This paper argues it is not the processes and organisation of those processes which are at fault: it is our failure to knowingly and intelligently use those processes as our ethics would demand. • And that it is possible to use the information which technocratised systems generate to argue for resources;

4. Ensuring social work values • Saenz de Ugarte and Martin-Aranaga (2011)have suggested a tool for ‘the professional exercise of social work in the two areas of intervention of social action with the greatest shortfalls – the economic and political...’: • This paper suggests another through the judicious use of data within the technocratised, risk based systems over which social workers have control.

5. Social work in the UK’s YJS: • YJS in the UK – risk based, theorised system of social work intervention • Work associated with particular interventions that engage convicted offenders seeking to rehabilitate and reduce crime (Liebman, 2007). • In general, different practice methods and legislation from social work with children and families; • Same ethical codes and social work training underpins practice

6. Social work in the UK’s YJS: • Highly theorised nature of practice in YJS distinguishes it from other areas of UK social work. • The risk based system assesses and measures the nature of the ‘problem’ using actuarial assessment system: Asset. • All interventions graded, according to a ‘Scaled Approach’, based on actuarial risk and principles and theory of risk (Farrington 1996). It determines the types of intervention offered, their intensity and duration; • It can be altered by limited professional discretion.

7. Ensuring social work values: • Scaled Approach example of current criticisms of the modernising agenda: that professional decision making limited and curtailed by managerial or actuarial systems. • However, there are benefits to actuarial assessment –it is on the whole more accurate and comprehensive because it forces the practitioner into a wider consideration of factors (Shlonsky & Wagner 2005).

8. Ensuring social work values: • Asset is a comprehensive assessment tool which has been much researched. • It assesses and counts ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ risks in four domains: • family • community • school • personal or individual factors.

9. YJS in the UK – risk based, theorised system of social work intervention • Risk factors can indicate someone may commit offences in the future – cannot tell us they will. • Protective factors also measured: can tell us a young person in school, lives with one/both parents, not materially deprived; but some yp with these protective factors are in YJS (Arnull and Eagle 2009). • Predictive accuracy for Asset re recidivism = 60-70% • Offers clarity re intensions and projected outcomes. • Service users empowered: know what is offered, why and what can be expected. • But may not tell the whole story.

10. Vulnerable young people with multiple needs : • Structurally social workers are creations of the statute and a practitioner working in either the welfare or justice specific system will work under some different legislation underpinning policy and practice. • However, many children and young people who are the subject of one form of assessment and intervention will encounter both forms:38% of frequent offenders in the YJS had been accommodated in LA care at some point in their lives, compared with 0.5% of the general population (Arnull et al 2005).

11. Using actuarial systems as an aid to ethics • By specifying the areas to be assessed and analysed, risk based actuarial systems may accord higher status to structural factors and gather more evidence. • Thus if the ‘corollaries between child poverty, social and economic inequality, youth crime and criminalisation are undeniable’ (Goldson and Munice, 2008). And: • Poverty and structural disadvantage identified as defining feature of many social work service users and a perennial issue the social work profession has done little to address or change (Cree, 2010; Cunningham and Cunningham, 2008) • This can be addressed within the YJS

12. The ethical challenge: • The power of assessment is to ensure it leads to justifiable, appropriate intervention. • Social workers should demonstrate that they ‘do things differently or more expertly’ (Rees and Wallace 1982) • Thus do they produce better outcomes? • Can we use actuarial systems to build evidence to do this effectively?

13. The ethical challenge: • Asset has not been used as effectively as it could have been. Arnull et al (2007) showed that data collected through assessment could be used to effect policy and practice change and lead to strategic responses. • They highlighted how information could be used to identify need and feed into wider social policy planning mechanisms

14. The ethical challenge: ‘The aggregation of the three Asset domains of Living Arrangements, Family and Personal Relationships and Neighbourhood can usefully identify the individuals and the population of young people who are in housing need or at risk of having housing problems.’ (Arnull et al 2007 Summary: recommendations).

15. The ethical challenge: • Social work’s own ethical base would suggest that some weight is given to structural disadvantage; • Our values urge us to acknowledge the agency which service users have and seek to empower them to draw on and develop this to counter disadvantage. • Offending can and does cause real harm and those working within the YJS can help young people to think about, understand and accept responsibility for their behaviour, helping them to form strategies for living effectively in the community without causing harm. • The tensions for social workers in doing this in the YJS are the same (if different) as those in other parts of the social care.

16. Is there an ethical challenge? • BASW’s ethical code (2012) contains a notion of challenge, of watchful awareness, of reflexive practice in which the practitioner consistently examines what they are asked to do in society’s name balanced against their code of ethics: • Those practising within the YJS are no different. • There is an inherent tension between social workers and the state because of the need to negotiate levels of provision, risk and care.

17. An ethical solution: • Social workers can maintain and promulgate social work values within the YJS. • In a world where notions of acceptable risk appear to diminish, and where evidence-based practice and actuarial justice are privileged, ethics become even more pertinent; • Actuarial tools can be used by social workers – to judge the accuracy of assessments, the efficacy of interventions and the ability of the state to facilitate the effective development of young people as future citizens, providing evidence about gaps, disjunctures and areas improvement.

18. An ethical solution? • The actuarial, risk based system of youth justice which exists in the UK has without doubt many faults, but also offers social workers opportunities to put their ethical imperatives in place. • It can be used to support, demonstrate and campaign for social justice, highlighting the needs of young people, used as part of a reflective cycle and because it ‘counts’ it provides the evidence of harm and need which can be used to campaign for change and resources. • We need to value young people who are delinquent and who offend • We need to value our social work ethics, skills and intelligence • We need to use the those to campaign effectively for social justice.