Beyond Youth Custody's programme of review and consultation, focusing on

trauma and young offenders

Why a conference focusing on trauma?

previous research on young offenders has highlighted these issues (as has feedback from young people themselves over a wide range of research projects);Beyond Youth Custody’s programme of issue-based research and practice reviews:

issues concerning trauma have been highlighted repeatedly, in recent feedback from Youth in Focus and other resettlement projects;

Some highlights from the review work

What trauma is, and what we should focus on

there are wide variations in the way that “trauma” is defined in the literature;some of the literature focuses only on very specific diagnosable conditions that are generated by traumatic experiences (e.g. PTSD), while other studies focus on both traumatic events and impacts as being a “spectrum” or continuum – an e.g. of the latter:

Research has shown that traumatic childhood experiences are not only extremely common; they also have a profound impact on many different areas of functioning. For example, children exposed to alcoholic parents or domestic violence rarely have secure childhoods; their symptomatology tends to be pervasive and multifaceted, and is likely to include depression, various medical illnesses, as well as a variety of impulsive and self-destructive behaviors. Approaching each of these problems piecemeal, rather than as expressions of a vast system of internal disorganization runs the risk of losing sight of the forest in favor of one tree.

van der Kolk, B. (2005)

different types of trauma are often inter-related in complex ways;

Mental illness among prisoners and the general population

  Prisoners 

General population 

Schizophrenia and delusional disorder 

8% 0.5% 

Personality disorder 

66% 

5.3% 

Neurotic disorder (e.g. depression) 

45% 

13.8% 

Drug dependency 

45% 

5.2% 

Alcohol dependency 

30% 

11.5% 

Source: Singleton et al. (1998) and Singleton et al. (2001)

Much of the available research is focused more generally on mental health, and is often correlational – an e.g.:

“People with childhood histories of trauma, abuse and neglect make up almost our entire criminal justice population.”

Teplin et al. (2002)

Occurrence and impacts – there is a reasonable consensus in the literature, that:

adverse childhood experiences increase the chances that young people will experience traumatic stress, but other factors (e.g. resilience, support, positive relationships) also limit the scope for longer lasting impact of such stress;where adverse experiences are multiple or chronic, the scope for negative impacts on individual health and development is increased, and this can be exacerbated where a pooling up of trauma is also accompanied by a lack of protective factors;“interpersonal traumas” (e.g. involving violence or child abuse) are more likely to increase the risk of subsequent further traumatic experiences and re-victimisation, than “non-interpersonal traumas” (e.g. road accidents, disasters);factors concerning lifestyle, socio-economic circumstances, and environment also play a role in determining complex patterns of traumatic experience .

causal links between childhood and adolescent trauma and offending are not always clearly traced in the available research, although some types of traumatic experience are predictive of offending (e.g. chronic bullying);the impacts of previous trauma are certainly relevant to the effectiveness of direct work with young offenders in terms of engagement however, and also have implications for the way in which we understand individual progress and longer-term outcomes

Next stages of the work involve:

a national consultation exercise focusing on issues concerning trauma and the resettlement of offenders (via online surveys and a programme of one-to-one interviews), and

finalisation of the literature review work, for release with the conference write up.