Placing Juvenile Delinquents in Child Protection Secure Units : Impacts on Intervention and Social Climate

• In Event: Understanding the Treatment of Justice-Involved Youth in Canada and the United Kingdom

Abstract

In Quebec, Canada, youth placed in residential settings can either be mandated in care under the child welfare or the juvenile justice system. Those two groups are usually placed into different units, but special circumstances such as being deemed a danger to others or themselves can force cohabitation in containment units. This paper aims to explore this concerning situation and its impacts on intervention and social climate in such secure mixed units. It draws on data gathered from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 10 practitioners working in secure care units and 10 adolescents. Findings suggest that mixing youth in secure units can generate ambiguity for practitioners with regards to the diverging objectives of intervention. Group intervention is also considered more complex and less effective depending on the heterogeneity of youth’s needs and clinical profiles. For adolescents, being remanded with juvenile delinquent and youth with self-harming behavior is experienced as highly destabilizing. Indeed, adolescents often have to witness physical coercive interventions, which can be really stressful. Those findings have important implications for the thinking of alternative measures to manage youth-at-risk without damaging them more then they already are when they come into secure settings. These implications are discussed.

Author

• Sabrina Bourget, Université Laval