By Clara Glynn, The Guardian.co.uk
In Scotland, if you’re under 18 and commit a crime, or if you’re abused or neglected by your parents, or indeed if you are in almost any kind of serious trouble, the chances are you won’t end up in court. Instead, you will find yourself in front of a “children’s panel”.
I moved to Scotland from England 12 years ago, and I’m still amazed by some of the differences between the two countries. In Scotland the age of criminal responsibility is eight, which is barbaric, though thankfully it’s about to rise. But the youth justice system is a model of enlightened, forward-thinking sanity. It’s a paradox.
A children’s panel is made up of three unpaid volunteers. The family and any other interested parties – social workers, teachers, relatives – sit around a table and discuss the child’s situation, and after 45 minutes the panel decide what should happen. These very ordinary people have extraordinary power, from locking up a child in a secure unit to taking him away from his parents and into the care of the local authority.
Because of the strict rules around confidentiality and children, the children’s panel doesn’t get much publicity, but I’ve been attending panels as an observer, and interviewing panel members to research a radio play. I’ve been amazed at the sadness and the goodness I’ve come across. The sadness because, unless you’re a social worker or you live in one of the worst Glasgow schemes, you probably have no idea of the situation many children find themselves in. Families with three generations of drug addicts, children whose neglect is so extreme it amounts to abuse. One of the professionals I interviewed described his job as “hacking away at the permafrost with a teaspoon”.
Goodness because, in spite of the terrible odds, you see examples of courage and selflessness that are just amazing. The foster mother who poured love into a difficult teenager and turned her life around. The granny who stepped up to the plate when no one else would and took on her daughter’s children. The child who emerged as a sane human being from a background that would poll-axe most of us.
The panel members are an interesting bunch – making difficult decisions with clarity and care. The youth justice system in Scotland is powered by these people – 3,000 volunteers across the country who give up an afternoon every two weeks to sit on a panel. One panel member told me he did it because he had a boring job in IT, and he wanted “to do some good in the world, if that doesn’t sound soft”.
Each panel has to be mixed gender – as more women than men volunteer, in practice this means each panel I saw had one man on it. Many of them were younger than I was expecting. They were from all sorts of backgrounds, from a taxi driver to a civil servant to a former merchant seaman with two armfuls of tattoos. You could say the children’s panel is David Cameron’s “big society” in action. Come north, you Tories – watch and learn.
The ethos of the children’s panel is non-judgmental. It’s not about reward or punishment, it’s just about what’s best for the children. Because there are usually no lawyers, because everyone sits around a table together and anyone can chip in, there is a real feeling in the best panels that we’re all in this together, trying to get to a solution. At the end of the session, once everyone has had a chance to speak, the panel members make their decision. They do it straight away. They get no chance to consult each other; it all happens in front of the family. I couldn’t do it. But I’m glad they can.
