The PM has promised a national network of intervention projects to cut anti-social behaviour, but do they work? One scheme in Dundee offers hope
A few weeks before he became prime minister, Gordon Brown made a low-key visit to a block of flats in a deprived suburb of Dundee. Unencumbered by minders and press photographers, he spent the morning hearing from a young mother with drug problems about a residential programme that saved her family from collapse.
Rather than whipping children away into the hands of the social services, the Dundee Families project sweeps the whole family into its care. Drug-addicted mothers are monitored as they receive treatment, parents with wildly out of control children are taught how to handle them, families who have been repeatedly evicted because of their antisocial behaviour learn how to control their lifestyles.
The visit made a deep impression on Brown, who has vowed to introduce the model nationwide, rehousing and retraining 50,000 of the most chaotic families.
Brown said in his party conference speech: "Most mums and dads do a great job â€" but there are those who let their kids run riot and I'm not prepared to accept it as simply part of life.
"Family intervention projects work. They change lives, they make our communities safer and they crack down on those who're going off the rails."
But can family intervention â€" clear rules and clear punishments â€" help solve Britain's antisocial behaviour problems?
Over the past decade, that grey block in a quiet Dundee cul-de-sac has been home to dozens of the city's most troubled families, people whose behaviour has attracted police attention, enraged neighbours and brought them to the brink of eviction. Some live here for a few months, others for as long as three years.
Staff here use the standard social work euphemism "chaotic" as shorthand for the extreme severity of these families' problems. They help people with drug and alcohol addictions, a whole range of mental disorders from depression to schizophrenia and learning difficulties.
"They may be displaying antisocial behaviour but they are also themselves very vulnerable," Jackie Crichton, a project manager at the centre, says. "Antisocial behaviour is a symptom of a lot of underlying issues."
Key to the programme's success is the intensive supervision and range of personalised support available. Echoing Tolstoy's observation that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, staff here say that the families' problems are all unique, and they spend weeks analysing the causes before they draw up individualised support packages. About 20 families are helped in their own homes and three more of the most severe cases are housed in this block of flats, their behaviour scrutinised by staff .
Balanced meals
Residents here must endure inspection visits three times a day. At breakfast time, a support worker will arrive in the flat to check that the family are up, that the children are being given a nourishing breakfast before being dispatched, on time, to school. In the evening, there will be another visit to make sure that the family are sitting down together to eat a balanced meal, that the school uniform is clean and ironed ready for the morning, that the children's homework has been done, and that they are in bed at a reasonable hour.
"Sometimes children are given a bit of last night's kebab on bread for breakfast or some mint choc chip ice-cream and are going to school unwashed, unkempt. That's what we have to check on," Linda Wood, another project manager, says.
No visitors are allowed for the first few weeks of the programme, and later they can come only once they have been through a police records check. A strict rota dictates when residents take their turn to mop the communal stairway (which smells dental-surgery-clean). "A lot of the residents find it prison-like to begin with," Wood admits. "I imagine initially they find it quite intrusive."
But Karen Smith (who did not want her real name printed), 30, has completed two years at the centre and is sure the experience helped transform her family's life.
She was transferred there from a women's refuge because of her son's profoundly disruptive behaviour. Whenever he was denied what he wanted, the boy, who was then eight, began to stamp on the floor or kick the wall. If he was particularly angry, the stamping would go on for half an hour; Karen would shout at him to try to make him stop, and soon he would begin lashing out at her. "Hitting me, banging his feet, kicking the walls, kicking me, nipping me. He was only little, but he could pack a punch. I'd have bruises all the way up my arm," she says. "I used to dread him coming home from school." The neighbours found the noise, which continued late into the night, intolerable.
"It was a bit noisy, and it happened quite frequently. I knew there was a problem," she says. "I was scared about coming here but I didn't have an option. I needed help with my son and I was facing eviction."
She found the constant monitoring oppressive to begin with. "I thought they were prying on me." Gradually she began to feel the benefits of it. If her son's behaviour got out of control, she could press a buzzer to get help from downstairs. "In the end, I didn't feel like they were observing me. I felt like it was more like a friend coming up," she says.
Effective praise
Parenting classes are crucial to the scheme's success because so many of the parents had troubled childhoods themselves. Another flat in the block has been converted into a teaching and therapy centre, where Grant King (who describes himself as a parenting practitioner) is teaching "effective praise", part of a widely-used "parenting pyramid" format which teaches parents the importance of praise, rewards, encouragement and the value of "five minutes of special time".
When confronted with challenging children, he works with parents first for six weeks, emphasising positive behaviour, how to listen, talk, give attention, play, empathise (all of which must be used liberally) before allowing them to move up the parenting pyramid to the discipline options â€" ignoring, distracting, explaining consequences and time out, which is to be used only sparingly, and never accompanied by shouting.
The lessons are about helping parents to find their way, he says. "It's not about standing at a whiteboard and saying 'do this, do that'." They are conducted in a warm sitting room, with candles, leather sofas, cushions and a flat-screen television showing footage of a flickering log fire. Art therapy and relaxation sessions also happen here, interspersed with subjects such as budgeting and home maintenance, cookery and shopping skills. Nutrition classes are held in the galley kitchen across the corridor. Children get counselling in a separate toy-lined room.
"A lot of the parents were chronic underachievers at school. We're getting them to learn to read alongside their children," Wood says.
There is a stark disconnect between the tough language used by Brown and the supportive ethos of the centre. Workers see the residents primarily as victims; Brown painted them as nightmare neighbours who were being sent on family intervention projects as a form of punishment. Staff point out that the model works purely because it is a voluntary scheme.
"The punishment for the families is that they are in a very difficult situation, they face losing their homes and their families," says Claire Tickell, chief executive of Action for Children, the charity that runs the project. "They might have had 13 or 14 different professionals involved in their lives, but they always say, 'This is the first time anyone has ever listened to me.'"
'We talk to each other now'
Recent residents of the block have included a heroin-addicted mother, struggling â€" and ultimately failing â€" to keep her child from being removed by social services, and an out-of-control extended family with 16 children, 12 of them born to one mother who was failing to cope with their increasingly delinquent behaviour.
"You do sometimes feel overwhelmed by the number of difficulties families have," King says.
After two years, staff agreed with Karen Smith it was time for her to move on, and helped her to find a new flat in the city. She has learnt to control her children and her son has almost entirely stopped his disruptive behaviour. The family eat together every night now, and she is able to insist that he is home at a reasonable time.
"I feel that I can manage the difficult problems that he has," she says. "We talk to each other now. Before, we were just shouting at each other. My son is much happier, I think, although he doesn't talk that much."
Staff say they have had a good success rate since the unit was opened. "I can't say people leave and live happily ever after, because their lives are complicated and difficult and you can't always make life better," Wood says, but on the practical question of maintaining a flat without alienating the neighbours and getting evicted, progress is clear.
Research conducted by Sheffield Hallam University on six similar family intervention projects in England showed that complaints against the families who were helped fell by 82% and school attendance increased by 84%. Two workers from Dundee have been seconded to the Home Office to help set up similar programmes across the country.
"It is incredibly cost-effective," Tickell says, as a result of the reduction in evictions, children being taken into care, school exclusion, rehousing and policing costs. The Sheffield Hallam study estimated that £213,420 had been saved by helping one family, calculating the amount that would otherwise have been spent on policing and providing state care for the family.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families estimates that, since the project was introduced in England in 2006, about 2,600 families have either gone through or are going through the programme in one of the 170 centres already in operation.
The concept also seems likely to survive a change of government. Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative thinking most about these issues, champions a charity, Save the Family, which has a similar goal of helping families stay together.
Karen Smith's support worker will continue to visit her twice a week for the next six months as she settles in, and staff will be available to offer support on the phone, night and day.
"My life is much easier now. I feel like I could go out and sustain a job," she says. "I couldn't have done that before. I was afraid of going out and seeing the neighbours, who were so threatening."
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