Beyond Youth Custody is focusing on trauma and young offenders through a programme of review and consultation. Previous research and feedback from young people has highlighted trauma-related issues. The review work has identified that there are varying definitions of trauma, and research shows traumatic childhood experiences are common and impact many areas of functioning. Studies also show people with childhood trauma and abuse make up the criminal justice population. The review found adverse childhood experiences can increase traumatic stress risk, and multiple or chronic experiences increase negative impacts, though other factors like resilience can limit this. The next stages involve a national consultation on trauma and resettlement, and finalizing the literature review.

1. Beyond Youth Custody's
programme of review and
consultation, focusing on trauma
and young offenders

2. Why a conference focusing on trauma?
previous research on young offenders has highlighted these
issues (as has feedback from young people themselves over a
wide range of research projects);
Beyond Youth Custody’s programme of issue-based research
and practice reviews:
 issues concerning trauma have been highlighted repeatedly,
in recent feedback from Youth in Focus and other
resettlement projects;

3. Some highlights from the review work
What trauma is, and what we should focus on
there are wide variations in the way that “trauma” is defined in the literature;
some of the literature focuses only on very specific diagnosable conditions that are
generated by traumatic experiences (e.g. PTSD), while other studies focus on both
traumatic events and impacts as being a “spectrum” or continuum – an e.g. of the
latter:
Research has shown that traumatic childhood experiences are not only extremely common; they
also have a profound impact on many different areas of functioning. For example, children
exposed to alcoholic parents or domestic violence rarely have secure childhoods; their
symptomatology tends to be pervasive and multifaceted, and is likely to include depression,
various medical illnesses, as well as a variety of impulsive and self-destructive behaviors.
Approaching each of these problems piecemeal, rather than as expressions of a vast system of
internal disorganization runs the risk of losing sight of the forest in favor of one tree.
van der Kolk, B. (2005)
different types of trauma are often inter-related in complex ways;

4. Much of the available research is focused more generally on
mental health, and is often correlational – an e.g.:
Mental illness among prisoners and the general population
Prisoners
General population
Schizophrenia and delusional disorder
8%
0.5%
Personality disorder
66%
5.3%
Neurotic disorder (e.g. depression)
45%
13.8%
Drug dependency
45%
5.2%
Alcohol dependency
30%
11.5%
Source: Singleton et al. (1998) and Singleton et al. (2001)

5. “People with childhood histories of trauma, abuse and
neglect make up almost our entire criminal justice
population.”
Teplin et al. (2002)

6. Occurrence and impacts – there is a reasonable consensus in the
literature, that:
adverse childhood experiences increase the chances that young people will
experience traumatic stress, but other factors (e.g. resilience, support, positive
relationships) also limit the scope for longer lasting impact of such stress;
where adverse experiences are multiple or chronic, the scope for negative impacts on
individual health and development is increased, and this can be exacerbated where a
pooling up of trauma is also accompanied by a lack of protective factors;
“interpersonal traumas” (e.g. involving violence or child abuse) are more likely to
increase the risk of subsequent further traumatic experiences and re-victimisation, than
“non-interpersonal traumas” (e.g. road accidents, disasters);
factors concerning lifestyle, socio-economic circumstances, and environment also play
a role in determining complex patterns of traumatic experience .

7. causal links between childhood and adolescent trauma and offending are
not always clearly traced in the available research, although some types of
traumatic experience are predictive of offending (e.g. chronic bullying);
the impacts of previous trauma are certainly relevant to the effectiveness
of direct work with young offenders in terms of engagement however, and
also have implications for the way in which we understand individual
progress and longer-term outcomes

8. Next stages of the work involve:
 a national consultation exercise focusing on issues
concerning trauma and the resettlement of offenders (via
online surveys and a programme of one-to-one interviews),
and
 finalisation of the literature review work, for release with the
conference write up.