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Young Wrexham

Youth Service Centres & Projects

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Wrexham Youth Justice Service

What is it?

Wrexham Youth Justice Service works with young people who are at risk of becoming involved in anti-social and criminal behaviour (the prevention side) as well as those who may already have be involved in these activities such as being arrested, possibly attending Court and receiving an ‘Order’.

Where is it?

The service is based at Unit 21 Whitegate Industrial Estate in Wrexham. It is fairly easy to get to by bus and walkable distance for lots of young people in the town.

Who works there?

We are a multi-agency service, which means we have representatives from other agencies working as one team. This helps to provide a really good service to young people.

The range of roles in the service include: social workers, youth workers, police officer, teacher, probation officers, substance misuse workers and a mental health advisor. We also link into a range of other agencies and services that can help us to support a young person involved in the youth justice service such as Careers Wales, schools, housing associations & the youth service.

So what happens if you are on a Court Order?

On a Court Order, a young person has to be involved in an assessment process and then attends appointments to meet with various staff at the service or our partner agencies. These appointments could be working in a group or one-tone with a member of staff to address the issues that may affect them re-offending.

The staff are there to support young people and deter them from remaining in the Youth Justice System after their Order has been completed.

So, every appointment is aimed to help and support the young person but also involves an element of ‘payback’ to the community.

The range of interventions is vast but does include:

It is often very hard for young people to attend their appointments as they would prefer to go out with their mates or do something else, but the Order requires them to come to appointments from either once per fortnight right up to 25 hour each week depending on their Order.

So what prevention services go on?

A number of projects are in place to prevent young people getting into trouble and ultimately becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

In Wrexham we run a number of projects that work with individual young people such as the Youth Inclusion Programme or YIP which are delivered through the Venture or the Caia Park partnership on our behalf. These projects aim to divert young people away from crime by getting re-engaged with education, find out new ways of spending their leisure time and become active citizens.

Another way to work with prevention is to work in local communities or by geographical area. The Early Intervention Team, work in a number of areas at a time with the community, the young people and many partner agencies to reduce anti-social behaviour and promote community engagement.

All this is done through innovative approaches and enables everyone to be able to discuss the issues & activities that would divert young people away from anti-social behaviour and improve their community. As a partnership the Early Intervention Team & other agencies work together to facilitate events where all members of the community can learn a bit more about each other. This often helps other members of the community understands the young peoples points of view and how they feel about things but also enables the young people to realise how some of their behaviour, which they may think is quite harmless, does actually have an impact on others. There is also a lot of time built in for the areas to celebrate how they are working with the young people.

This team also provides a ‘rapid response’ service is ever there is a need for an intervention a short notice

Look out for Information on the Dragons Den Competition…. The Early Intervention Team are looking for great ideas of how you would like to deal with some of the issues that could be seen as anti-social in your community. The winning area will win a small pot of money to make this happen!

So what happens about the victims of crime?

Victims of any crime are encouraged to become involved in the service by a number of different routes. Some Orders support the victim to attend a special meeting with the young offender & staff to describe the impact it has had on their lives, their family, their personal fear but to also ask questions such as ‘Why me?’ to the offender. Other victims of crime can request specific reparation activities are undertaken such as planters to be made and donated to the hospital or the damage that an offender has committed is repaired.

Where do I find out more?

If you want to know more about any part of the youth justice system and information such as what all the different Court Orders mean, a really good place to start with is the Youth Justice Board website. It has 3 areas to its website and one of those areas is to provide information to all members of the public including young people.

Can I be involved in the Youth Justice Service any other way?

We are always on the look out for volunteers to work with us in a variety of roles.

We are also keen to recruit peer educators: young people who would be trained to deliver workshops around anti-social behaviour issues such as arson or graffiti. Peer education is a really good way for young people to learn as they are ‘taught’ by other young people and it would aim to inform young people about he consequences off their actions, if they became involved in criminal activity.

We would really welcome anyone to be a peer educator if they have been on a Court Order themselves and feel that they want to share their experiences with others to prevent them following the same path.