South Lanarkshire Youth Justice Intensive Support Service

The Youth Justice Intensive Support Service is a new, innovative and exciting area of work for Quarries young peoples services. The service takes the form of community outreach work whereby project workers build supportive relationships with young people referred by statutory agencies to encourage them to engage and work with us to achieve shared aims as agreed in their support plans. Young people referred to the service are generally between the ages of 12 and 18years, are known to existing services and meet the criteria for being deemed serious and persistent offenders.

The outreach work with young people in the community offers young people and their families positive support with the aim of empowering them to develop and build pro-social lives free from offending. The project has adopted an ethos of viewing offending as a symptom of an underlying problem or issue in the young people’s life, and therefore recognizes that with offending behaviour there are usually other issues in the young person’s life with which they need help to address. These issues can include homelessness, drug and alcohol misuse, relationship breakdowns, money problems, fragmented family relationships - to name but a few. The project staff believe that all young people have the ability to change for the better, with appropriate support and guidance. To really make a positive impact on a young persons life, offending behaviour cannot be viewed in isolation and therefore a person centered, multi-faceted, holistic approach is what the team offers. Research has shown that maintaining good family ties can significantly reduce a person’s risk of re-offending. Therefore we recognize the importance of engaging and supporting the young person’s family in the work we undertake with them, where possible and appropriate.

The main areas of work undertaken include:

• Utilising the theoretical underpinnings of rehabilitation models in our work, such as The Good Lives Model.
• Intensive community based support and supervision
• Building emotional/social capacity
• Alcohol and drug action plans
• Engagement with leisure / community activities as diversionary work
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
• Family / Parent work
• Anger Management
• Family Solution Focused Therapy
• Pro Social Modeling
• Relationship Building/Effective Disapproval

We base our interventions with young people on the ‘Getting it Right for Every Child’ principles of integrated working and seeing the whole young person – physical, social, emotional and educational needs, seeking to use resources in the most effective way.