childcare-50years

5
remanded or placed in a secure unit under the provisions of the
Police and Criminal Evidence Act; and
• children who are offenders have too often been excluded from
mainstream services in education and training and, while there are
exceptions to this, the quality of services that they have been
given have not been of adequate standard to help the child
reintegrate. There has been insufficient focus on the issue of
school exclusion. A scheme of school based conferencing has
recently been introduced on a pilot basis by Barnardos, working in
partnership with the Southern Education and Library Board, aimed
at intervening before the suspension of a pupil takes place.
The report of the Criminal Justice Review offers an opportunity to set
in place good multi-agency standards for police, probation, social
services, the juvenile justice centre and other agencies so that they
can work together in a joined up and effective way. To be effective
this will require publicly published standards, key performance
measures and engagement with sentencers. The review group also
considered that restorative justice might be particularly useful in
dealing with juvenile offenders without a long history of criminality
but whose offending was a matter of real concern to local
communities. Restorative justice is an approach to dealing with harms
created by crime which views such problems as a breakdown in
relationships and seeks to repair those relationships. It tries to
balance the rights and interests of offenders, victims and the
community. Rather than by dealing with them as a violation of the
law where the offender must be punished, restorative justice focuses
on the harm that the crime does to the victim, to the community and
also to the offender. The aim is to repair the damaged relationship
which may be at the root of criminal behaviour and which will have
been further damaged by that behaviour.
The review group has recommended the development of restorative
justice approaches for juvenile offenders and that a restorative justice
approach should be integrated into the juvenile justice system in
Northern Ireland. While the review group recommended that a court
based youth conferencing scheme should operate on the basis of
court referrals it has also acknowledged that pre-court conferences
50 YEARS OF CHILD CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND
121