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British Journal of Social Work (2004) 34, 395-411
British Journal of Social Work 34/3 © BASW Trading Ltd 2004 all rights reserved
Responding to Youth Crime in Scotland
Bill Whyte is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland at the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling.
Correspondence to Bill Whyte, Director, Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh, Flat 1FR, 31 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LJ. E-mail: B.Whyte{at}ed.ac.uk
Summary
Scotland’s Children’s Hearings deal with young people who offend within an integrated system dealing also with young people in need of care and protection, on the assumption that the difficulties of both groups have similar roots in multiple social disadvantage and social adversity (Whyte, 1998a). A government-funded study, one of the first since the system’s inception in 1971, was commissioned to examine the social characteristics of over 1,000 children and young people referred for offence and nonoffence reasons. This paper describes the characteristics of 465 of the young people who were referred specifically for offending. It provides the first ‘official’ data in twenty-five years on young people in the system. The study found that most of those referred for offending had characteristics strikingly similar to those referred for nonoffence reasons, as predicted when the system was first established, and similar to those present in the general literature on young offenders from other jurisdictions. The study poses fundamental questions taken up by the Scottish Executive’s review of youth crime on how best to design systems and develop social interventions that can address offending and social disadvantage in an integrated way.
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