The case of a 16 year old youth now before the Youth Court after a long list of serious difficulties in the home and the community may finally be coming to a conclusion. Unfortunately the conclusion may not be satisfactory to those involved. The youth, who cannot be named because the matter is currently before the court, has never been named because he has been the subject of first, custody proceedings and now criminal proceedings. His offences include robbery, arson and driving without a licence as well as longstanding behavioural problems in the home and community. As reported by the CBC, Judge Jamie Campbell said he had a "sense of helplessness" when it came time to sentence the boy.
It’s no wonder that there is confusion as to what should be done to help this boy. He has been in numerous facilities from an early age when his grandparents (guardians) asked the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services to intervene in 2009. He was placed in several institutions and group facilities and foster homes not only on this province but also other parts of the country that had well known programs for difficult youth. His behaviour even included defying court-imposed restrictions numerous times. It was obvious that the grandparents as well as the court system and the services available in the community were not effective in changing this boy’s behaviour.
How this situation is being portrayed in the media and the youth’s existing behaviour exemplifies how difficult it is for available programs to adapt to individual situations. Most programs developed in the community think about services and programs as being set up to serve numbers of children and youth. In fact, children and youth are referred to these programs with very difficult behaviour for which a specific specialized program may not be appropriate. As the community develops these programs we end up with an array of programs and services which cannot serve all children and youth referred to them. This is simply because there will always be a child who will not fit the program. The community is then left with the dilemma of finding a program that is appropriate for the child or youth.
The next thing that happens is for the family and the community to blame the system for not responding to their specific needs. The system has great difficulty to plan for services not knowing well in advance what the treatment requirements will be for a future behaviour problem. However, the public expects that the system can and should respond to their particular need whenever it arises. The system responds and tries to develop services that are flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of presenting problems. Yet this approach does not allow for extreme behavioural situations.
The prevailing approach over the years has been to remove the responsibility from parents and set up controlled settings where problem behaviour can be modified. It is what society did in the early days to treat mental illness. That is, set up large institutions where mentally ill patients could be placed with the expectation that the patient will be treated hopefully cured and then returned to the community. This was followed by dismantling the large institutions with a preference for small scale facilities such as group homes and supervised apartments where mental illness could be treated in the community. Service planners have learned from the past and now, for some children, the group home solution is being substituted for treatment in the child’s own home supplemented with appropriate services in the community. This presupposes that appropriate services can be made available in each community – a requirement that may be unreasonable or too expensive. The insistence that appropriate services should be available in each community where a difficult problem occurs so that a child or youth can live at home with parents would be difficult to impossible to develop. Its positive aspects are that parents are required to take part in the treatment which they must do in order to responsibility raise their child. It does not let the parent off the hook by handing over a difficult child or youth to someone else to assume responsibility in their place. Professionals are now insisting that parents take an active part in treatment. Sometimes this means that the parent themselves may need treatment for behaviour that has been transferred to the child or youth. Unfortunately there are other situations where the destructive behaviour of the parent is the cause of the child’s problem. If something cannot be done to correct the parent’s contributing behaviour then a decision needs to be made to treat parent and child separately. This often means that a court has decided that the child must be removed from the home and not the parent because there is no law to force the parent to leave their own home. Courts are reluctant to remove children from their parents and usually is done as a last resort when all else has failed.
So, the prevailing approach to treatment of children and youth is to have a continuum of treatment options available - specialized foster homes, group homes, institutions and parental homes with community support services readily available. There will always be the need to search for specialized programs that exist in other parts of the province or country. No province can have every conceivable program readily available when needed. Unfortunately out-of-province treatment will need to remain an option in rare situations and it is regrettable that such treatment separates parent and child which is a negative factor that needs to be evaluated before placement.
Our government health system has many demands for services and programs for adults as well as children and youth. It does no good to blame one segment of the community or the other. What is needed is a collaborative effort of all interested parties – parents, government and professionals. Often it takes the judicial system to bring all parties together to focus on the needs of a child or youth. This is what seems to have happened in the current case reported in the media. Apparently the latest court hearing was focussed on a new program of the IWK Health Centre called the Halifax Youth Attendance Centre - an individualized treatment day program that allows a youth to return home each evening. Time will tell if it is too late to be effective for this young person and his guardians.
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