Prevención orientada a jóvenes de 18-25 años:

This section provides an overview of the principal practical applications of the concept of vulnerability within services. Such uses were mainly related to assessment and classification of young people, which then triggered certain responses. Due to this, the notion could be associated with ‘net-widening’³² processes, with particular implications for young people who were considered

‘vulnerable’ and also ‘transgressive’.

32 ‘Net-widening’ here refers to expansionary trends in the criminal justice system, or processes connected to the prevention of crime which lead to more subjects being drawn into judicial arrangements (see Cohen, 1979 or McLaughlin and Muncie, 2013: 282-283)

5.2.1 Assessment and use as a child protection ‘flag’

Vulnerability seemed to be most commonly utilised in the classification and

measurement of young people’s need for welfare and/or disciplinary interventions.

The concept was a key term employed to alert other professionals to a serious problem and the need for some sort of action. Often the term was considered a tool in efforts to trigger ‘child protection’ statutory responses:

I think there’s words that will be used within the Social Care environment to kind of highlight a young person’s needs, as in ‘extremely vulnerable’ or

‘significant risk of harm’… I think they’re the ones that will get the support and recognised, because those words are there *…+ You’ve just gotta say that word [vulnerability] really! [laughs] (Manager, welfare service for

‘vulnerable’ children)

Despite a lack of clarity in what ‘vulnerability’ meant to informants, it was standard for consideration of young people’s vulnerability to form part of the ‘assessments’

made by agencies; that is, the procedures which practitioners used in order to measure or classify young people before interventions were planned and delivered:

… it might be that from looking at referrals, we identify the children we think are most vulnerable and needed seeing more urgently possibly than others.

(Project Worker, young carer’s service)

In the case of the services which had stronger disciplinary components to their practice (YOS, the Local Authority Housing Unit and the FIP), there were more clearly delineated lines along which assessment of vulnerability operated:

… it's part of our risk screening, risk and vulnerability screening processes and procedures, when we do assessments of risk, we are assessing

vulnerability as well, and that's made explicit in the documentation and also in the training that we have done, looking at young people and adults that are vulnerable. (Manager, FIP)

Several informants indicated that assessing vulnerability was also important for their work with adults³³. The assessment of young people’s ‘vulnerability’ was described by the YOS senior manager as “absolutely critical” to the organisation’s national screening tool, Asset, as ‘vulnerability’ was one of three key areas on which interventions were decided and planned:

... having a high vulnerability rating therefore triggers actions and the intervention plan and accountability from that, and the intensity of that intervention” (Senior Manager, YOS)

As the idea of vulnerability as being connected with the social control of young people is a key driver of this research, this issue requires further consideration.

5.2.2 Net-widening and the policing of vulnerability

Although assessments of vulnerability were undoubtedly well-intentioned and designed to be supportive, young person’s perceived vulnerability could also trigger more intensive interventions, which they could then be disciplined for not

responding to. This connects the identification and management of young people’s vulnerability with net-widening. Perhaps the most obvious example of this was in the assessment processes for the YOS, where the Senior Manager indicated there had been debate on the matter:

... if you had two people who went out and committed an offence, who burgled a shed, one of them had no issues whatsoever but our Asset [assessment tool] says, you know, ‘fairly minor offence and from a stable background’; and the other one’s [Asset assessment] said ‘well fairly minor offence but all these vulnerabilities’, one of them could be sentenced to a more punitive disposal [sanction] than the other one. And actually, that more punitive disposal means a higher restriction on their liberty and more chance of breaching it and therefore more chance of going into custody and everything else. So actually, you are being pushed into more punitive

33 The assessment of vulnerability has been shown to be significant in the provision of adult services. For explorations of how notions of vulnerability function in services for adults see Beckett (2006), Hollomotz (2011) and also Brown (2012).

disposal on the grounds of your vulnerability, not on the grounds of the seriousness of your offence. (Senior Manager, YOS)

The language of this quotation might sound technical to some readers. Just to underline the meaning here, the manager is suggesting that when a young person is assessed by the YOS as having high vulnerability, the responsibility of the agency to act is greater. If another person committed an identical crime and was assessed as

‘not vulnerable’, the YOS’ responsibility to act is not as great. The implications are that within the YOS’ interventions, young people could potentially be deemed as vulnerable, assigned certain interventions as a result, and then be disciplined or disapproved of for not accepting the intervention. A more critical reading of this process is that it may result in increasingly punitive responses to young people with higher ‘vulnerabilities’.

The YOS manager also suggested that the duties of disciplinary agencies like the YOS to respond to young people’s vulnerability had increased in recent years.

Although he felt that this had led to more effective services in some respects, he also saw a risk that young people’s vulnerability would be increasingly be subject to monitoring with potentially punitive implications. When I asked him what

happened in instances where young people had ‘high vulnerability’ but posed a low risk to the public, he answered as follows:

That’s the million dollar question really. Things have changed. Some time ago, a young person who came to our service with high levels of vulnerability but low risk of reoffending may have generated a low score and we might have been - not saying totally - but we might have been closer to taking the stance that the risk of reoffending is low, therefore our agency has less to offer. *…+ Now that has changed. The expectations have changed on us. You know, we’re part of the safeguarding board and that sort of thing, and quite rightly, and you know, let’s be honest about where this is driven in terms of the expectations of the inspectorate. When they come in, they’re asking us three questions. The three questions are: do you protect the public from the risk of serious harm? Do you protect the public from the likelihood of

offending? And do you safeguard those young people? And we get scored in each one of those categories. You know, do we do that well enough or not? So that is, that’s important to us, or equally important to us. (Senior Manager, YOS).

In other words, it would seem that the YOS has had increasing responsibilities to manage young people’s ‘vulnerability’ as well as ‘offending’. The implication is that more young people have been brought into contact with the YJS on the basis of vulnerability. Also, the nature of a young person’s mandatory contact with the YOS may be more intensive where they are deemed ‘vulnerable’. Seen within a broader context of increasingly punitive responses to disadvantaged young people within the criminal justice system (see Jacobson et al, 2010, Goldson and Peters, 2000, Goldson, 2002b), this is concerning. That young people’s behaviour is increasingly policed ‘in the name of protection’ is an issue which has been raised in relation to young women involved in prostitution (Phoenix, 2002). Evidence from my case study would suggest that this may be a wider trend applicable more generally to

‘vulnerable’ young people, and especially those whose behaviours or family life brings them into contact with the youth justice system. This net-widening via responding to young people’s vulnerability could perhaps be viewed as having certain facets in common with the policing of anti-social behaviour, which is now heavily associated with the idea of ‘vulnerable families’ (cf Flint, 2011).

5.2.3 Non-blaming discourse

Another common practical use of vulnerability was lexical. The concept was seen as offering a means for referring to young people who had experienced considerable difficulties in a way that indicated that they were not to blame for these problems.

This mechanism was valued highly in many cases:

… it’s about being sensitive, but I think in a way vulnerability is like a kind term *…+ it’s trying not to put blame on anybody, it’s the situation maybe that they’re in (Project Worker, welfare service for ‘vulnerable children’)

… it's an empathetic word, and a word that people kind of like. It's non-judgemental (Senior Clinical Psychologist, CAMHS)

One informant noted that drawing on the notion of vulnerability offered practitioners a means of actively avoiding young people being seen negatively, shaping interventions they received in a positive way:

... it’s used subconsciously, partly to gain another agency’s sympathy; you know, if you’re making a referral to another agency, as a hook that people will feel more sympathy perhaps towards say a teenager who’s an offender who’s described as vulnerable because of their background, who may also be an offender. But if you’re referring them to an agency who doesn’t specialise in offending and started off describing them as an offender that might sort of limit the response you’d get. Whereas, if you described them as a vulnerable young person who happens to offend, that might get a more sympathetic response. (Retired Commissioner, City Council Children’s Unit)

This would seem to support the contention I have argued for elsewhere (Brown, 2011b), that labelling people as ‘vulnerable’ seems to offer a way to circumvent (or at least attempt to circumvent) them being seen as to blame for their problems, and acts as an appeal against the impulse to condemn them for their actions or lifestyles (see p. 45). In this sense, vulnerability can operate as a way of emphasising structural factors which contribute to a person’s difficulties or disadvantages.

5.2.4 Use as an organising principle in resource distribution

Finally, commissioners and policy-makers as well as practitioners reported that the classification of vulnerability was an integral part of claims-making on resources and the organisation of services. Perceived vulnerability status acted as a trigger or mechanism whereby young people ‘qualify’ for interventions, with 11 of the 15 practitioners, managers and commissioners commenting that addressing vulnerability was an important part of commissioning processes for services for children and young people. At the time of the case study, there were several commissioners within the City Council whose job titles referred to particular responsibilities to ‘vulnerable groups’. One of the commissioners interviewed explained that the notion was central to his role:

I use it to characterise services and directions of services, so which bits of services are going to deal with more vulnerable, less vulnerable

(Commissioner A, City Council Children’s Unit)

Five of the informants had been involved in the distribution of New Labour’s VCG (see 3.1.2), which seemed to have given rise to some of the council’s commissioning infrastructure which was aimed at addressing ‘vulnerability’. There was agreement that the idea of the grant was to “bring all these little funding streams, all sort of unmanageable, under one sort of umbrella” (retired Commissioner, City Council Children’s Unit). The commissioner for vulnerable groups within Education services described that when the money for the VCG appeared in her budget, she pulled together all of the services working with various groups and “we developed a policy and a strategy” (Commissioner B, City Council Children’s Unit). A particularly candid view of the VCG’s implementation was given by another commissioner; in a

quotation that illustrates how problems with defining ‘vulnerability’ have been pertinent in commissioning processes:

There were various forms of strategy development locally and nationally with people going, ‘great! This programme is going to deal with vulnerable kids’, ‘The vulnerable kids, yeah, you know the ones!’, ‘Yeah! The ones! We all know who the vulnerable kids are!’, ‘so we’re gonna start tomorrow with domestic violence’, ‘no, they’re not the vulnerable ones, the vulnerable ones are the looked after.’ You know, I'm not sure if it's any more considered than that, actually. (Commissioner A, City Council Children’s Unit)

The informant from the FIP confirmed the impression given by analysis of official documentation (see Chapter 3) that resources for his service were linked to concerns about “vulnerable families”. That FIPs are concerned with the management of ‘vulnerable families’ is highlighted in the literature on these programmes (see Batty and Flint, 2012) which also links the concept the anti-social behaviour policy agenda, most recently evolving in part into a policy agenda around

‘troubled families’ (see Department of Communities and Local Government, 2001a and 2001b).

The Senior Manager at the YOS felt that the presence of vulnerability in

commissioning was more by the “back door” rather than being something “on the front door”:

... commissioning follows priorities, so I mean, you know, the substance misuse commissioning says ‘here’s your pack of money for substance misuse commissioning in the YOT. Here’s the target to, you know, screen x number of people and, you know, do it by, within y timescale’, et cetera. And that’s probably what we’re commissioning for. So probably vulnerability is not coming into that. In [city], we’re saying ‘what are our priorities’? Our priorities follow the children and young people’s plan. (Senior Manager, YOS)

As this quote illustrates, commissioning processes for ‘vulnerable’ groups of young people tended to centre around specific problems or circumstances, rather than on views of the vulnerability of young people per se. Particular services are

commissioned to address particular difficulties or issues which young people (and their families) might encounter. This range of service provision is seen as

addressing the needs of ‘vulnerable’ young people, meaning that the concept of

‘vulnerability’ seemed to function as an organising principle in how services were commissioned and distributed, but more implicitly rather than explicitly.

By way of a summary of 5.2, we have seen that the main use of ‘vulnerability’ in services for young people related to the ways in which users of services were classified and awarded priority. The use of the notion by welfare professionals was considered a way of positioning young people as ‘needy’ without blaming them for their circumstances. There were some indications that where young people were seen as vulnerable they were more likely to be brought into more intensive interventions. In instances where ‘vulnerable’ young people did not respond to such interventions positively, there could be punitive implications, connecting the concept with net-widening.