Restorative Justice/Victims
The Angus Restorative Justice Service is a partnership between The WEB Project and Tayside Council on Alcohol, and has been actively supporting young offenders (person responsible) and the victims (person harmed) of youth crime since September 2002. The project currently takes referrals from the Children's Reporter, Tayside Police, Angus Council Social Work Department, Education, LMART and young people themselves. In the period April 07 to March 08, the Service received 22 referrals from the Children's Reporter, 12 referrals from Social Work, 7 referrals from Tayside Police, 4 referrals from LMART and 1 referral from Education.
The Service works with young people between the ages of 11-17 with the aim of helping them understand how they have affected people and address the harm they have caused. It allows young offenders the opportunity to take personal responsibilty for their behaviour and make positive changes, reducing repeat offending. Work undertaken with these young people includes the completion of a tailor-made awareness raising programme (ranging in duration from 6-12 weeks), face-to-face meetings with the victims of youth crime, group work, writing a letter of apology to the victim, community tasks, anger management programmes, and other programmes specific to the offence in question.
Restorative Justice Interventions also allow the people harmed by youth crime to take part in the process, ask questions and get answers, say how they feel about what happened, receive an apology and identify how the young person may be able to make amends for the harm done. The communication can be direct (face-to-face) or indirect (using a worker as a go-between) and participation is voluntary.
View the Angus Restorative Justice Service Annual Reports:
- April 2005-March 2006 (75 KB PDF)
- April 2007-March 2008 (100 KB PDF)
"This method also allows victims of youth crime, to take part in the process."