PARENTS WHOSE sons or daughters frequently end up in trouble with the law need to take a much greater role in their children's lives, Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan told a seminar yesterday.
Speaking at the launch of a report by the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development, the High Court judge said that emphasising parental responsibility was crucial in our approach to tackling juvenile crime.
"We have got to try to ensure that people who have children look after them - we have to demand that. We have got to insist that if young men have children they are made to realise their responsibilities at a very early age, and that goes for women too," Mr Justice Sheehan said.
He added that social workers and care workers were facing an enormous task in trying to engage and rehabilitate young people who have often suffered considerable abuse or neglect.
"It is clear that at an early stage in their lives, these young people have undergone enormous suffering, frequently as a result of bad or absent parents," he said.
"Young social workers and teachers are being called on to attempt to engage with these people. It is very easy for us to underestimate the enormous tasks we are giving to these young social workers, care workers or prison officers."
The Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development yesterday published a report, Community, Custody and Aftercare: The Journey Towards Social Inclusion, which includes research papers relating to young offenders.
Among the papers is research showing the vast majority of young offenders are in critical need of psychiatric help and are failing to get it. The report, Emotional Intelligence, Mental Health and Juvenile Delinquency, by Dr Jennifer Hayes and Dr Gary O'Reilly of UCD studied 30 boys in four detention centres over three years.
It found 83 per cent of the boys - aged on average just under 15 years - had three times as many psychiatric problems as boys referred to psychiatric services in the community and 20 per cent said they had attempted suicide on at least one occasion.
