Leading youth organisation, the Foundation for Youth Development (FYD), says that ‘residential camps’ play a role in the rehabilitation of youth offenders, but they cannot function in isolation.

The Foundation has run successful youth offender programme, Mentoring Youth New Direction (MYND), in Auckland for several years, it involves short ‘mentoring camps’ along with several months of professional mentoring support and intensive social work interventions with the participants in their community.

MYND Founder and Director, Stephen Boxer, says that a camp is an integral way to remove participants from harmful influences in their everyday life, but true success lies in a robust community support programme.

“The camp component of MYND is incredibly important, acting as a bonding mechanism between the young people and the professionals who will support and work with them throughout the programme.

“We operate with a ‘do as I do, not as I say’ philosophy, so the camps are an important way to evidence role modelling behaviour and also build trust – some of our young people have never had an adult to believe in or look up to before.”

However, once the mentoring camps are completed, Boxer knows that the breakthroughs achieved in the wilderness must be followed up with strong support back in the teens’ own communities and each participant on the MYND programme is assigned both a professional mentor and a social worker.

“The camps are great, they’re free from distractions and negative influences so good work gets done. But these kids also need a huge amount of ongoing, professional support otherwise it’s all too easy to slip back into the activity that got them in trouble in the first place, this is where many ‘boot camp’ initiatives fall over.”

MYND was founded in 2001 and came under the FYD umbrella four years ago after Boxer found himself close to burn-out, the merger offered the opportunity to access the strong governance of FYD and further develop the programme.

“The merger with FYD gave us the opportunity that many other programmes don’t have, the ability to access strong governance, invest in training for staff, to employ more people – which enabled staff to be rested, to introduce evaluation, as well as look at programme development and producing materials like manuals.”

The programme continues to achieve positive results, recent Government statistics show an over 70% decrease in serious offences and an over 60% reduction in the number of offences overall.

FYD co-founder, mountaineer Graeme Dingle, says that the youth offender statistics released this week is the first time that such evaluation has been conducted and this is a step in the right direction.

“It’s easy to criticise, but the Government should be congratulated for having the guts to invest in rehabilitating youth offenders. There is no quick fix; these are not ‘mother’s little angels’ that we’re dealing with. MYND addresses the top 20% of youth offenders, committing 80% of the crime, and it takes foresight, fortitude and no short amount of patience to turn this around.

“Providers of youth offender programmes need to be in for the long haul, as do those who are funding them, these kids deserve a chance to turn their lives around and the cost of failure to the country is huge.”

ENDS

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