Delinquents' parents need help not blame

THE researcher Seamus O Cinneide once said that social policy in this State proceeds by means of a series of moral panics.

Parenting appears to be the subject of the latest moral panic.

In particular, for the parents of children deemed to be engaging in anti social behaviour, the storm clouds are gathering.

Ten days ago, masked men who broke into a house in Blanchardstown, Dublin, to vent their anger at "joyriding" on the people living there beat up a 19 year old man - but they also beat up his mother.

Reporters who visited the scene the next day found little sympathy for the family among the neighbours.

The leaders of the massive anti "joyriding" protest in Cork - following the tragic death of two young people - have said both parents and children should be educated about this behaviour and its consequences.

Assistant Garda Commissioner Tom King has laid much of the blame for recent "joyriding" incidents in Killinarden, Dublin, at the door of parents who fail to control their children.

The Children's Bill, now on its way through the Oireachtas, will allow the courts to oblige parents to control their children. It will also allow the courts to order parents to pay compensation to their children's victims.

Yet many doubt the efficacy of taking a punitive approach to parents and suggest that help might be more effective.

These include Mrs Margaret Ahern, who is one of the leaders of the anti "joyriding" protest in Cork.

"If the children are out of control at home and their fathers and mothers can't handle them, social workers and psychologists should be brought in and brought into the schools," she says.

"A lot of the kids I have heard of in the past two weeks would be out of control at home and the parents don't know what to do with them."

WHILE there might be a minority of parents who don't care, most of those whose children are out of control simply don't know what to do, she says.

They need to be educated in what to do. "The children can actually tell you I am going out to such and such a person's house to sleep," she says. "What's needed is for the parent to check up during the night to make sure the children are in that house."

Father Edmond Grace SJ is chairman of a committee which has moved the drug pushers out of Hardwicke Street Flats in Dublin. The committee is credited with having brought about a remarkable fall off in criminal activities in the area.

"Parents don't send their children out to break the law," he says. "They may give up, and some parents do lose control of their kids, but it's no good scapegoating them.

"What kind of support do people give to the family? The ideal is that there should be two parents but very often that isn't the situation. People need some kind of support and help. We haven't provided the proper services in this respect. There's a problem there.

Assistant Commissioner King referred to the energy of young people and their need to have something to do with that energy and Father Grace agrees.

"They're living in the streets - they need facilities," he says. "When I was their age I had fields to run in.

That afternoon he had noticed some local youngsters "burning newspapers and letting them fly down the road in the wind".

In an urban setting with few facilities, this was the equivalent, he said, of country children "hanging out of branches and swiping the heads off weeds".

PARENTS need help rather than blame, he says. "There is a long term problem about parents and parenting and people needing help as parents. But it's not a question of scapegoating people."

The assumption that parents "ought" to be able to control out of control children comes across strongly from practitioners of the "I blame the parents" syndrome.

This has been contradicted again and again, not only by people working on the ground, but by the various expert bodies set up to look into the problems of juvenile delinquency.

One committee of experts drawn from the criminal justice, education and care systems has called for aids to parenting which would include "amenities such as playgrounds, community centres, recreation centres and playing fields".

Local community centres, it says, should run courses "which would help parents to cope with family matters".

Families at risk of getting into the sort of trouble in which children could become delinquent or be taken into care "may be saved from break up by the provision of adequate financial benefits and a system of family support to enable them to overcome their difficulties".

Sympathetic advice and help could also assist such families, it says, as could intensive social work intervention.

Many authoritative reports have called for systems to help troubled and troublesome children to make better choices - a process which would be of benefit both to them and to their potential victims.

That, in turn, means helping parents.

Few, if anybody, would claim that any such systems have been put in place in spite of the recommendations of expert groups.

But perhaps the expert group quoted here, and which was, after all, headed by a district judge, will be heeded now?

Unlikely.

It is called the Kennedy Report.

It was published in 1970.