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The other day DN was able to tell about 18-year-old David. Despite being treated by social services according to LVU this summer, the youth care law and then they gave him a place in a closed children’s home where the administrative court found that he was staying, he was found murdered in mid-November.
Due to strict secrecy, DN has not been able to find out who had formal responsibility at the time he was shot and killed. The latest decision made by the administrative court on continuing care in a closed institution in September referred to plans underway for him to receive care in more open ways under the auspices of social services. He may have been discharged from the SiS home just before he was killed.
Anyway Are you dead now?
– There is always the risk of a gap arising when social services discharge a young person from one of our homes, especially when it comes to those who are released from closed juvenile care where it is not taken for granted that the person is relevant to social services, says Catrine Kaunitz. , business developer at SiS head office.
In concrete terms, this means that all young people leaving SiS must have an orderly existence: supervision, care and good relationships, in other words, an alternative to a destructive lifestyle.
To get there you need all the social functions that exist around the young person work with the big picture. Today, the rules of secrecy and the fact that the relevant authorities are often organized in downspouts still apply to him. The information that should be exchanged between the various actors also sometimes gets stuck on the road or simply never leaves the desk where it ends.
Cooperation between the police, social services, SiS and civil society, where, for example, non-profit organizations and foundations have a lot of knowledge and resources, also has “potential for improvement”, as Catrine Kaunitz puts it.
“Young people who commit serious crimes in a more or less organized way can be difficult to motivate. They are still rising in the hierarchy, “says Catrine Kaunitz, a business developer at SiS headquarters.
Photo: Johanna Lundstedt
Regarding the careHowever, the support and treatment of young people who commit serious crimes is often very difficult. As in David’s case, the young man has often undergone a number of different interventions before ending up in an SiS home, sometimes according to LVU, sometimes because the young man has been sentenced to closed juvenile care.
– Young people who commit serious crimes in a more or less organized way can be difficult to motivate. They are still rising in the hierarchy. The many disadvantages of the criminal lifestyle have not taken over. They have few alternatives to life of crime that are perceived as attractive, says Catrine Kaunitz.
These guys Many times it comes from socio-economically vulnerable backgrounds and families where violence has been a characteristic since childhood. It is not uncommon for there to also be individual vulnerability in the form of, for example, neuropsychiatric diagnoses, Catrine Kaunitz describes the general picture.
– Add the lack of schooling and a residential area where you are surrounded by other children and young people who have the same problems as you, he continues.
A shorter emergency placement in SiS, which is the most common, can be a start and an opportunity for social services to plan more and get help from SiS with evaluating which interventions are appropriate.
– Alone, however, a location cannot change anything. These are usually short attention spans and multi-complex problems.
For a longer treatment placement, or when a young person has been sentenced to hospitalization, it does not matter if the results of the treatment are good enough – if the young people who are discharged again end up in the existence that is the basis of the problems.
– It is obvious that we must improve in the transitions between a location with us and the later time, says Catrine Kaunitz.
Every year, around 1,200 young people are discharged from SiS households. In the past two years, 130 of them have served a sentence under LSU, the law on closed juvenile care enforcement. Of the 73 youths discharged in 2019, 15 percent had been convicted of murder or manslaughter, 56 percent for robbery, 30 percent for assault and 11 percent for sexual offenses. It is not known how many of them may be related to some form of network-related crime. However, a fact is that it has become more difficult to place young people in the right place and at a suitable distance from former “friends” and “enemies” in ongoing conflicts between networks.
The Prison and Probation Service previously received this year on behalf of the government, together with SiS, the National Board of Health and Welfare and the police authority, to develop a national strategy on how more young people (and adults) should have access to dropout activities, which may include access to housing protected elsewhere. Today it works very differently in different municipalities. In larger cities, like Stockholm, there are also different routines in different parts of the city, but Interior Minister Mikael Damberg (S) believes that more structure is needed.
– It is obvious that responsibility must be clearer and that existing skills must be used more efficiently, says Catrine Kaunitz.
The task has not yet been completed.
Read more: 36 million for social services to prevent future crimes
