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Security—a dirty word?
Journal of Adolescence 1978,
I,
345-351
Security-a dirty word? GERALD BARLOWt The need for secure provision for difficult and allegedly highly disturbed adolescents continues to be felt by both Social Services and Health Service institutions. The author who has worked in two Youth Treatment Centres, describes the setting up of these secure establishments by central government, and briefly examines different perceptions of their role -the views of agencies and individuals who use them, and of those who work in them. The Centres see "security" as having a therapeutic as well as a protective function. Control is a necessary part of adolescent development, but is particularly important as an ingredient of professional care for disturbed young people. Both the secure building and the controlled environment of Youth Treatment Centres are important parts of a programme which finally aims at the client's self control and independence. Security and control are often seen as a negative last resort, and decried as part of legitimate or necessary intervention in the care of adolescents. In fact control is often an essential accompaniment of care or treatment and professionals have to be prepared to offer adequate control if their caring or therapeutic efforts are to be effective.
THE NEED FOR SECURE PROVISION On most days of the week, in one of the country's Social Services departments, a social worker comes to the end of months of fruitless search for a residential place which will accept a highly disturbed or difficult boy. The social worker may be hard pressed by an increasingly important bench of magistrates and even by an angry outcry in the press. He is told that the assessment centre refuses to hold the child any longer, maybe even that staff are threatening to walk out if he is not removed. Some place has to be found which can contain the violent, unpredictable behaviour which has led to rejections from previous placements. Or perhaps it is in the adolescent unit of a hospital that a similar crisis occurs, where a girl has run away for the fifteenth time and has committed several offences with a gang of local boys, some of them on hospital property. She has failed to stick to any contract for more than a few days, and is highly disruptive. The staff feel that not only can they make no progress with her, but also that she is preventing the rest of the group from making any headway with their treatment. She must leave-but there is nowhere she can • Based on a paper presented at the Annual APSA Conference at Lancaster, July 1978.
t Deputy Director, D.H.S.S., Glenthome Centre, Kingsbury Road, Erdington, Birmingham . @ 1978 The Association for the Psychiatric Study of
Jots
Adole.cftl~
346
GERALD BARLOW
go. She has been assessed as needing psychiatric treatment or supervision, but no-one is sure what that should be even if she could be held for long enough to .receive it. It has been the fashion in recent years to decry the usefulness of residential care for such young people, and in particular the use of secure provision. Instead, projects in the community have been advocated as being cheaper, more natural and potentially just as effective. Certainly the poor success record of all sorts of residential provision for adolescents, in terms of reconvictions or renewed contact with the police, has fed this liberalising movement. In the United States, the authorities in Massachusetts closed down most of their residential institutions overnight in favour of developing community projects. They have however had to retain a number of secure establishments in order to contain those young people which the community schemes found too dangerous or difficult to cope with. Again, still in the U.S.A. the family group homes of Achievement Place in Kansas, Boys Town, Nebraska, and elsewhere are much admired for changing the behaviour of delinquent boys and girls in small group homes in the community run by two or three "teaching parents". However, it is a feature of these projects that they do not take the very violent adolescent or those convicted of serious offences-largely because of what the neighbours would say. Also all the projects have to use some sort of fall-back resource-a "long stop" which can come to the rescue if a boy or girl becomes too difficult to contain, or refuses to give that necessary minimum of commitment on which these programmes depend. In this country it is much the same. Secure Units were originally designed to take boys who proved intolerably disruptive to the life of the approved schools. These units today are always full, and every week local authorities and the D.H.S.S. receive requests for places in these and other secure establishments for young people whom no-one else will take. Some experiments have gone a long way towards coping with very difficult adolescents in open homes with foster parents, or in other community schemes; but these are few and far between. Local authorities vary enormously in the resources they can offer for such youngsters, and capable resilient adults prepared to do this work are hard to find. The situation is that there is always a number of younger people who need immediate holding and containment, whether for their own safety or that of the public. Cases which receive national publicity, children who commit violent or serious offences, young people who rape old ladies or burn down schools, who throw them sleves off roof tops or under buses, who terrorise neighbourhoods or brutalise themselves-these cases are rarely taken (and more rarely held on to) by community schemes and often prove too much for open residential institutions. There is an existing and persisting need for
SECURITY-A DIRTY WORD?
347
somewhere which will take them, somewhere which does not select young people to fit some part of a treatment typology or specialised approach-the cases are far too widely differentiated for that luxury-but which can be used by local authorities when they have nowhere else to turn. YOUTH TREATMENT CENTRES It was against this background and to meet this need that in 1971 the Department of Health and Social Security opened the first of what was planned to be three Youth Treatment Centres. They provide secure accommodation for highly disturbed boys and girls between 12 and 18 years of age. These are young persons in the care of local authorities, usually who have been tried in several other child care establishments, but who have been either too difficult or too successful at running away to enable a programme of constructive, stable care to be developed. The Centres offer long-term placement, if necessary for as long as the care order lasts. The staff are drawn from different professions-teaching, nursing and residential social work. They provide a high staff: child ratio, offering a wide variety of skills in order to afford individual programmes to meet the needs of each child. Children admitted to the Centres are assessed by an admission panel as initially being in need of physical security. However, the holding process is intended to give way progressively to a more open regime, enabling the children to use increasing responsibility and freedom. The model is intended to be one of growth and development, rather than of illness. The first Centre, St Charles Y.T.C., Brentwood, Essex, after a difficult start, slowly evolved a two-stage regime. This initially provided a controlled, structured life in a secure unit with firm confrontation of difficult behaviour. From this a boy or girl moved to a more open unit where more was expected in terms of insight, self control, and where difficult behaviour was "talked through" either in group meetings or individually. The second Centre (Glenthorne Y.T.C., Birmingham, opened in February 1978) has opted from the outset for a more deliberately behaviourist approach This was partly to facilitate the setting up of a new institution by employing a method demanding and providing a high degree of staff consistency. It was also felt that concentration on obvious and immediate behaviour problems initially offered a realistic, hopeful programme for young people who often had little self-esteem after repeated rejection and emotional trauma. Both Centres work from common assumptions: that care and containment are compatible; that physical security is not only necessary for the child's or public's safety, but also is a pre-requisite for solving these young people's difficulties; that control is a necessary basis for emotional growth; and that in each case social rehabilitation and self sufficiency is the intended goal of a
348
GERALD BARLOW
programme which begins with locked doors and a controlled environment. This applies both to those who have committed offences (some serious) and to those who have not. . . Youth Treatment Centres are offered as a national resource by central government to provide what local authorities cannot. They form a safety net under the child care system, to catch and hold young people for a final attempt to stabilise and socialise before the penal system is reached. The demand for places far exceeds their availability, and indicates the extent of the continuing demand for secure accommodation. EXTERNAL EXPECTATIONS What do people expect of secure establishments? Speaking only for Youth Treatment Centres (although other secure establishments may well share our experience), we face a wide range. of expectations from the courts, from social workers, from different professionals who sign assessment reports, from the public, and from those concerned with children's rights. Often these interests are themsleves confused and ambivalent. Some want the young person punished, others want him saved from punishment. Some want him locked away and kept there, others want him given a chance to grow and, develop in safety. Some are looking for control for the young person, others for the specialised care afforded by a high staff ratio. Of course many of these expectations are not incompatible. However, it often appears that those instrumental in referring cases to us are far from clear about the difference between a Y.T.C. and a borstal, about whether they want care or punishment, and what their criteria are for locking up a boy or girl who may have committed serious offences or may have committed none at all. In addition the political pressures from those anxious about preserving law and order or about the increase of delinquency, also bear significantly on secure establishments. It is often those voices which demand more secure places which also criticise the high cost of secure provision and attack such unnecessary waste of public money on such undeserving cases. But all these different voices, if we fail to meet their expectations, will express disillusionment with and even rejection of secure provision. INTERNAL PERSPECTIVES It is through this jumble of different interests and expectations that we have to clarify our task, both to ourselves arid to others. Certain priorities stand out reasonably clearly, and are suggested by the word "security" itself. It means two things: first, "making and keeping safe", and secondly "freedom from anxiety and apprehension".
SECURlTY-A DIRTY WORD?
349
Our first task is to hold and contairi boys and girls who, without such provision, would be a danger to themselves or to other people, and for whom there is no other way of avoiding that harm. Secondly, we have to provide that element of child care (among several others) which lifts the burden of anxiety and fear from shoulders too young to cope with it. This is something that is needed immediately by the child or adolescent who is in crisis, frightened, bewildered, angry, without internal boundaries or external controls, and has possibly been in that state for a long time, passed on from person to person, place to place. He needs someone now to hold him and do the controlling for him, without asking of him any response or contract or requiring him to make a relationship or to develop insight. He or she just needs holding-now. At the start therefore, care and control go together: care (the only sort that matters at this stage) is control, control which is perhaps for the first time in the youngster's life effective and consistent. Later, the care task takes on a different shape, as security becomes a part of the individual rather than just of his environment. External controls have to become internalised j a coercive regime has to become a contractual one j goals have to be negotiated rather than imposed. It is the process which all parents experience as their child slowly over the years assumes more reponsibility. It is when normal socialisation has not taken place, where controls have failed or have never been provided by parents, that others have to try and provide the necessary controls and concertina the process of building security into a few short years. THE NEED ,FOR CONTROL It is hardly necessary to argue with most who have tried to bring up children that control is an essential element in the development of a child's life. However, it might be necessary to argue it with some professionals involved in working with adolescents. \Ve have heard recently for example the opinion expressed that we should stop trying to treat or cure young people, and leave the due processes oflaw and punishment to take their course (Morgan, 1978). This view is supported both by those' anxious to suppress difficult behaviour by the young, and paradoxically also by those anxious to protect young people's rights. Certainly the sort of control we are attempting at Y.T.Cs does invade areas of a young person's life which would remain untouched by the penal system. Some youngsters, especially those detained under Section 53 of the C.Y.P. Act for serious offences, might indeed prefer to go somewhere for straight-forward punishment rather than undergo a lengthy programme which attempts to change their' behaviour and attitudes. It is indeed with considerable ethical trepidation that we undertake such intervention. 'Ne believe however that it can legitimately be described as care. It is a task which every parent undertakes, to make decisions for his child and shape his life as
35°
GERALD BARLOW
he believes best. We take a similar responsibility, making quite arbitrary decisions about what behaviour is desirable and what is not, in the belief that we can thus offer the best chance of social adjustment and the widest range of skills and choices to the young person on leaving the Centre. Others who may challenge the degree to which we intervene in a young person's life come from the social work profession within which we work. It is felt by some social workers that control is not part of the helping role, and that behaviour change is not the task of our profession. For example, Peter Righton (1978) says it would be "shedding a needless burden" if we abandon the belief that social work with criminals and delinquents "could or should have a preventative effect on current of potential miscreants". However, the nettle of trying to control and change delinquent behaviour has to be grasped, and not only by those working in secure residential establisments. All social workers (and I suspect more psychiatrists than just those we criticise in communist states) are in the business of social control. As Professor Peter Leonard (unpublished) points out, in every piece of casework elements of social control are present: whenever we talk about "the right course" for the client to take, or even help him towards "his own choices" or "self control", we are bringing our own values and attitudes to bear. Client self-determination is a myth, and is particularly questionable if allowed to shape the attitudes of social workers towards their adolescent clients. Young people need clear boundaries as well as friendship, confrontation as well as kindness, direction as well as freedom. Everyone involved in helping young people should be prepared to offer both care and control, to be clear about what we feel is acceptable behaviour and what is not, and to work for the former. How can an adolescent rebel or reject if you've offered him nothing to work on? It is not good care if a girl in a Community Home is told that the staff will go on loving her no matter what she does, and she is then allowed to throw her food at the wall without comment. It is the confusion resulting from a lack of adult control from professional helpers as well as inadequate parents that we have to try and work at in a Y.T.C. Finally, though, why is a secure building necessary? Why can we not use houses, or at any rate places without locks and high walls. First, those who continuously run away when faced by anxiety or uncomfortable reality, do have to be held if anything is to be done to help them. Most of us have walked out and slammed the door on a painful situation, but we do usually manage to return and offer verbal attempts to solve the problem. So do many adolescents, and they don't need locking up. But others run and keep on running, not just because of their environment but because it's the only response they know to being controlled. It is a matter of degree of how much inner control they have. So too with disruptive behaviour: many who throw a tantrum or take the occasional swipe at someone with a chair can survive quite well without being
SECURITY-A DIRTY WORD?
351
place? behi?d locked doors. Others ~owcver have reached the stage wh ere this their habitual response to frustration or stress, With them, you do need the building as part of the secure environment, as well as the skilled people. Most of the young people who come to a Y.T.C. are just not able to reason or compromise: their responses are at first on the whole unrelated to the people they are dealing with, but are previously learned angry Orfrightened responses which have become generalised. There is a period during which those responses have to be received, contained and then offered back again to the adolescent as unacceptable. It is a period of testing out, during which both building and staff have to hold firm, and when staff may well need a secure building to fall back on. Only after that testing can trust be born and only then can individuals be separated from the delinquent group, and commitment to an individual programme can be sought. It is a time reminiscent of the primeval chaos of creation before order begins to dawn, a time of alientation where no relationships exist. If a young person is in that state then physical control is the first necessity of care. Locking up children will not of itself change their delinquent behaviour, but it is often an essential part of a more complex programme to achieve that end. A secure building acts as a symbol of our intentions as well as functionally making them possible. It spells out "we will hold on to you and control you, whatever you do, and after that you will walk out of here in control of yourself". At Glenthome we begin to offer it through a basic management system, a token economy which controls every minute of the day; it then develops into individually tailored programmes with targets relevant to why the young person came to us and to his survival when he leaves. The last stage will include teaching his family, or helping him out in his own social environment and job. All that however is another story. IS
CONCLUSION Work within secure establishments may be the dirty work of our society. Security however should not be a dirty word, particularly for those engaged in helping adolescents whatever their degree of difficulty or disturbance may be. Control and care go hand in hand j those not prepared to tackle the former will, I suggest, not be very successful at the latter. REFERENCES Leonard, Peter (unpublished). Social Control. Clan Values and Social Work Practice. Morgan, Patricia (1978). Delinquent Fantasies (1978). Temple Smith Righton, Peter (1978). Last Word. Social Work Today (6 June 1978).
I,
345-351
Security-a dirty word? GERALD BARLOWt The need for secure provision for difficult and allegedly highly disturbed adolescents continues to be felt by both Social Services and Health Service institutions. The author who has worked in two Youth Treatment Centres, describes the setting up of these secure establishments by central government, and briefly examines different perceptions of their role -the views of agencies and individuals who use them, and of those who work in them. The Centres see "security" as having a therapeutic as well as a protective function. Control is a necessary part of adolescent development, but is particularly important as an ingredient of professional care for disturbed young people. Both the secure building and the controlled environment of Youth Treatment Centres are important parts of a programme which finally aims at the client's self control and independence. Security and control are often seen as a negative last resort, and decried as part of legitimate or necessary intervention in the care of adolescents. In fact control is often an essential accompaniment of care or treatment and professionals have to be prepared to offer adequate control if their caring or therapeutic efforts are to be effective.
THE NEED FOR SECURE PROVISION On most days of the week, in one of the country's Social Services departments, a social worker comes to the end of months of fruitless search for a residential place which will accept a highly disturbed or difficult boy. The social worker may be hard pressed by an increasingly important bench of magistrates and even by an angry outcry in the press. He is told that the assessment centre refuses to hold the child any longer, maybe even that staff are threatening to walk out if he is not removed. Some place has to be found which can contain the violent, unpredictable behaviour which has led to rejections from previous placements. Or perhaps it is in the adolescent unit of a hospital that a similar crisis occurs, where a girl has run away for the fifteenth time and has committed several offences with a gang of local boys, some of them on hospital property. She has failed to stick to any contract for more than a few days, and is highly disruptive. The staff feel that not only can they make no progress with her, but also that she is preventing the rest of the group from making any headway with their treatment. She must leave-but there is nowhere she can • Based on a paper presented at the Annual APSA Conference at Lancaster, July 1978.
t Deputy Director, D.H.S.S., Glenthome Centre, Kingsbury Road, Erdington, Birmingham . @ 1978 The Association for the Psychiatric Study of
Jots
Adole.cftl~
346
GERALD BARLOW
go. She has been assessed as needing psychiatric treatment or supervision, but no-one is sure what that should be even if she could be held for long enough to .receive it. It has been the fashion in recent years to decry the usefulness of residential care for such young people, and in particular the use of secure provision. Instead, projects in the community have been advocated as being cheaper, more natural and potentially just as effective. Certainly the poor success record of all sorts of residential provision for adolescents, in terms of reconvictions or renewed contact with the police, has fed this liberalising movement. In the United States, the authorities in Massachusetts closed down most of their residential institutions overnight in favour of developing community projects. They have however had to retain a number of secure establishments in order to contain those young people which the community schemes found too dangerous or difficult to cope with. Again, still in the U.S.A. the family group homes of Achievement Place in Kansas, Boys Town, Nebraska, and elsewhere are much admired for changing the behaviour of delinquent boys and girls in small group homes in the community run by two or three "teaching parents". However, it is a feature of these projects that they do not take the very violent adolescent or those convicted of serious offences-largely because of what the neighbours would say. Also all the projects have to use some sort of fall-back resource-a "long stop" which can come to the rescue if a boy or girl becomes too difficult to contain, or refuses to give that necessary minimum of commitment on which these programmes depend. In this country it is much the same. Secure Units were originally designed to take boys who proved intolerably disruptive to the life of the approved schools. These units today are always full, and every week local authorities and the D.H.S.S. receive requests for places in these and other secure establishments for young people whom no-one else will take. Some experiments have gone a long way towards coping with very difficult adolescents in open homes with foster parents, or in other community schemes; but these are few and far between. Local authorities vary enormously in the resources they can offer for such youngsters, and capable resilient adults prepared to do this work are hard to find. The situation is that there is always a number of younger people who need immediate holding and containment, whether for their own safety or that of the public. Cases which receive national publicity, children who commit violent or serious offences, young people who rape old ladies or burn down schools, who throw them sleves off roof tops or under buses, who terrorise neighbourhoods or brutalise themselves-these cases are rarely taken (and more rarely held on to) by community schemes and often prove too much for open residential institutions. There is an existing and persisting need for
SECURITY-A DIRTY WORD?
347
somewhere which will take them, somewhere which does not select young people to fit some part of a treatment typology or specialised approach-the cases are far too widely differentiated for that luxury-but which can be used by local authorities when they have nowhere else to turn. YOUTH TREATMENT CENTRES It was against this background and to meet this need that in 1971 the Department of Health and Social Security opened the first of what was planned to be three Youth Treatment Centres. They provide secure accommodation for highly disturbed boys and girls between 12 and 18 years of age. These are young persons in the care of local authorities, usually who have been tried in several other child care establishments, but who have been either too difficult or too successful at running away to enable a programme of constructive, stable care to be developed. The Centres offer long-term placement, if necessary for as long as the care order lasts. The staff are drawn from different professions-teaching, nursing and residential social work. They provide a high staff: child ratio, offering a wide variety of skills in order to afford individual programmes to meet the needs of each child. Children admitted to the Centres are assessed by an admission panel as initially being in need of physical security. However, the holding process is intended to give way progressively to a more open regime, enabling the children to use increasing responsibility and freedom. The model is intended to be one of growth and development, rather than of illness. The first Centre, St Charles Y.T.C., Brentwood, Essex, after a difficult start, slowly evolved a two-stage regime. This initially provided a controlled, structured life in a secure unit with firm confrontation of difficult behaviour. From this a boy or girl moved to a more open unit where more was expected in terms of insight, self control, and where difficult behaviour was "talked through" either in group meetings or individually. The second Centre (Glenthorne Y.T.C., Birmingham, opened in February 1978) has opted from the outset for a more deliberately behaviourist approach This was partly to facilitate the setting up of a new institution by employing a method demanding and providing a high degree of staff consistency. It was also felt that concentration on obvious and immediate behaviour problems initially offered a realistic, hopeful programme for young people who often had little self-esteem after repeated rejection and emotional trauma. Both Centres work from common assumptions: that care and containment are compatible; that physical security is not only necessary for the child's or public's safety, but also is a pre-requisite for solving these young people's difficulties; that control is a necessary basis for emotional growth; and that in each case social rehabilitation and self sufficiency is the intended goal of a
348
GERALD BARLOW
programme which begins with locked doors and a controlled environment. This applies both to those who have committed offences (some serious) and to those who have not. . . Youth Treatment Centres are offered as a national resource by central government to provide what local authorities cannot. They form a safety net under the child care system, to catch and hold young people for a final attempt to stabilise and socialise before the penal system is reached. The demand for places far exceeds their availability, and indicates the extent of the continuing demand for secure accommodation. EXTERNAL EXPECTATIONS What do people expect of secure establishments? Speaking only for Youth Treatment Centres (although other secure establishments may well share our experience), we face a wide range. of expectations from the courts, from social workers, from different professionals who sign assessment reports, from the public, and from those concerned with children's rights. Often these interests are themsleves confused and ambivalent. Some want the young person punished, others want him saved from punishment. Some want him locked away and kept there, others want him given a chance to grow and, develop in safety. Some are looking for control for the young person, others for the specialised care afforded by a high staff ratio. Of course many of these expectations are not incompatible. However, it often appears that those instrumental in referring cases to us are far from clear about the difference between a Y.T.C. and a borstal, about whether they want care or punishment, and what their criteria are for locking up a boy or girl who may have committed serious offences or may have committed none at all. In addition the political pressures from those anxious about preserving law and order or about the increase of delinquency, also bear significantly on secure establishments. It is often those voices which demand more secure places which also criticise the high cost of secure provision and attack such unnecessary waste of public money on such undeserving cases. But all these different voices, if we fail to meet their expectations, will express disillusionment with and even rejection of secure provision. INTERNAL PERSPECTIVES It is through this jumble of different interests and expectations that we have to clarify our task, both to ourselves arid to others. Certain priorities stand out reasonably clearly, and are suggested by the word "security" itself. It means two things: first, "making and keeping safe", and secondly "freedom from anxiety and apprehension".
SECURlTY-A DIRTY WORD?
349
Our first task is to hold and contairi boys and girls who, without such provision, would be a danger to themselves or to other people, and for whom there is no other way of avoiding that harm. Secondly, we have to provide that element of child care (among several others) which lifts the burden of anxiety and fear from shoulders too young to cope with it. This is something that is needed immediately by the child or adolescent who is in crisis, frightened, bewildered, angry, without internal boundaries or external controls, and has possibly been in that state for a long time, passed on from person to person, place to place. He needs someone now to hold him and do the controlling for him, without asking of him any response or contract or requiring him to make a relationship or to develop insight. He or she just needs holding-now. At the start therefore, care and control go together: care (the only sort that matters at this stage) is control, control which is perhaps for the first time in the youngster's life effective and consistent. Later, the care task takes on a different shape, as security becomes a part of the individual rather than just of his environment. External controls have to become internalised j a coercive regime has to become a contractual one j goals have to be negotiated rather than imposed. It is the process which all parents experience as their child slowly over the years assumes more reponsibility. It is when normal socialisation has not taken place, where controls have failed or have never been provided by parents, that others have to try and provide the necessary controls and concertina the process of building security into a few short years. THE NEED ,FOR CONTROL It is hardly necessary to argue with most who have tried to bring up children that control is an essential element in the development of a child's life. However, it might be necessary to argue it with some professionals involved in working with adolescents. \Ve have heard recently for example the opinion expressed that we should stop trying to treat or cure young people, and leave the due processes oflaw and punishment to take their course (Morgan, 1978). This view is supported both by those' anxious to suppress difficult behaviour by the young, and paradoxically also by those anxious to protect young people's rights. Certainly the sort of control we are attempting at Y.T.Cs does invade areas of a young person's life which would remain untouched by the penal system. Some youngsters, especially those detained under Section 53 of the C.Y.P. Act for serious offences, might indeed prefer to go somewhere for straight-forward punishment rather than undergo a lengthy programme which attempts to change their' behaviour and attitudes. It is indeed with considerable ethical trepidation that we undertake such intervention. 'Ne believe however that it can legitimately be described as care. It is a task which every parent undertakes, to make decisions for his child and shape his life as
35°
GERALD BARLOW
he believes best. We take a similar responsibility, making quite arbitrary decisions about what behaviour is desirable and what is not, in the belief that we can thus offer the best chance of social adjustment and the widest range of skills and choices to the young person on leaving the Centre. Others who may challenge the degree to which we intervene in a young person's life come from the social work profession within which we work. It is felt by some social workers that control is not part of the helping role, and that behaviour change is not the task of our profession. For example, Peter Righton (1978) says it would be "shedding a needless burden" if we abandon the belief that social work with criminals and delinquents "could or should have a preventative effect on current of potential miscreants". However, the nettle of trying to control and change delinquent behaviour has to be grasped, and not only by those working in secure residential establisments. All social workers (and I suspect more psychiatrists than just those we criticise in communist states) are in the business of social control. As Professor Peter Leonard (unpublished) points out, in every piece of casework elements of social control are present: whenever we talk about "the right course" for the client to take, or even help him towards "his own choices" or "self control", we are bringing our own values and attitudes to bear. Client self-determination is a myth, and is particularly questionable if allowed to shape the attitudes of social workers towards their adolescent clients. Young people need clear boundaries as well as friendship, confrontation as well as kindness, direction as well as freedom. Everyone involved in helping young people should be prepared to offer both care and control, to be clear about what we feel is acceptable behaviour and what is not, and to work for the former. How can an adolescent rebel or reject if you've offered him nothing to work on? It is not good care if a girl in a Community Home is told that the staff will go on loving her no matter what she does, and she is then allowed to throw her food at the wall without comment. It is the confusion resulting from a lack of adult control from professional helpers as well as inadequate parents that we have to try and work at in a Y.T.C. Finally, though, why is a secure building necessary? Why can we not use houses, or at any rate places without locks and high walls. First, those who continuously run away when faced by anxiety or uncomfortable reality, do have to be held if anything is to be done to help them. Most of us have walked out and slammed the door on a painful situation, but we do usually manage to return and offer verbal attempts to solve the problem. So do many adolescents, and they don't need locking up. But others run and keep on running, not just because of their environment but because it's the only response they know to being controlled. It is a matter of degree of how much inner control they have. So too with disruptive behaviour: many who throw a tantrum or take the occasional swipe at someone with a chair can survive quite well without being
SECURITY-A DIRTY WORD?
351
place? behi?d locked doors. Others ~owcver have reached the stage wh ere this their habitual response to frustration or stress, With them, you do need the building as part of the secure environment, as well as the skilled people. Most of the young people who come to a Y.T.C. are just not able to reason or compromise: their responses are at first on the whole unrelated to the people they are dealing with, but are previously learned angry Orfrightened responses which have become generalised. There is a period during which those responses have to be received, contained and then offered back again to the adolescent as unacceptable. It is a period of testing out, during which both building and staff have to hold firm, and when staff may well need a secure building to fall back on. Only after that testing can trust be born and only then can individuals be separated from the delinquent group, and commitment to an individual programme can be sought. It is a time reminiscent of the primeval chaos of creation before order begins to dawn, a time of alientation where no relationships exist. If a young person is in that state then physical control is the first necessity of care. Locking up children will not of itself change their delinquent behaviour, but it is often an essential part of a more complex programme to achieve that end. A secure building acts as a symbol of our intentions as well as functionally making them possible. It spells out "we will hold on to you and control you, whatever you do, and after that you will walk out of here in control of yourself". At Glenthome we begin to offer it through a basic management system, a token economy which controls every minute of the day; it then develops into individually tailored programmes with targets relevant to why the young person came to us and to his survival when he leaves. The last stage will include teaching his family, or helping him out in his own social environment and job. All that however is another story. IS
CONCLUSION Work within secure establishments may be the dirty work of our society. Security however should not be a dirty word, particularly for those engaged in helping adolescents whatever their degree of difficulty or disturbance may be. Control and care go hand in hand j those not prepared to tackle the former will, I suggest, not be very successful at the latter. REFERENCES Leonard, Peter (unpublished). Social Control. Clan Values and Social Work Practice. Morgan, Patricia (1978). Delinquent Fantasies (1978). Temple Smith Righton, Peter (1978). Last Word. Social Work Today (6 June 1978).