Reimagining Secure Care : A Vision for the Future

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Gibson, Ross and Whitelaw, Ruby (2024) Reimagining Secure Care : A Vision for the Future. Children's and Young People's Centre for Justice, Glasgow.

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Abstract

The issue of children being deprived of their liberty is a global one, with Nowak (2019) providing a conservative estimate that up to 1.5 million children are placed in a locked setting each year. This causes significant concern over the realisation of children’s human rights and poses challenges to states who seek to honour the commitments made within the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – in particular Article 37 - and other relevant international treaties (Haydon, 2018; Kilkelly et al., 2023; Nowak & Krishan, 2022). Scotland’s Independent Care Review (2020) reached several conclusions about secure care, making specific reference to the design, function and delivery of this specific form of out-of-home care. With this having precipitated consideration of the future configuration of services and supports to those children who face, make or take the highest level of risk, the ‘Reimagining Secure Care’ project was commissioned by the Scottish Government to explore potential options as to what a reimagined Secure Care should look and feel like for children in Scotland before, during and after secure care, aligning with legislative changes and in keeping with the longer term aims of the Promise. With this in mind, this literature review attempts to offer context and background reflecting developments, approaches and current thinking about the evolving nature of secure care, and should be read in conjunction with the Reimagining Secure Care final project report, and the children and young persons’ report. Several limitations of this literature review must be highlighted. Firstly, the literature review is incomplete in that it only draws on literature from the English language. Secondly, the literature reviewed draws almost exclusively from the Global North. Both these factors result in a review that is Anglo-centric and lacks the insight that may be found among scholars from other parts of the world. Thirdly, the ambiguity of the term ‘secure care’ means that relevant literature may be missing due to the difficulty in identifying suitable, pertinent literature.

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