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Early intervention to prevent gang involvement and youth violence
A PRACTICAL GUIDE
STEPHANIE WADDELL JONATHON TOY
This guidance has been produced in collaboration with the Home Office. © Early Intervention Foundation 2015. We encourage the wide use of this document. However you may not use this work for commercial purposes; nor alter, transform, or build upon this work except with our express written permission.
The Early Intervention Foundation’s (EIF) aim is to shift spending, action and support for children and families from Late to Early Intervention, from picking up the pieces to giving everyone the best start in life. We want to see a pre-emptive approach which focuses on addressing the root causes of problems before they become entrenched. Not only can this shift in attitude and spending improve outcomes for the next generation and their families, it has the potential to reap significant financial savings. As a What Works Centre, sitting alongside the Col-lege of Policing What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, we use evidence to inform policy and practice with the goal of driving improvements to children’s outcomes and breaking inter-generational patterns of disadvantage and dysfunction. We are delighted to have worked with the Home Office to produce this practical guide to early intervention. One of the key priorities of the Home Office’s Ending Gang Violence and Exploita-tion programme is to ‘Promote early intervention - using evidence from the Early Intervention Foundation to identify and support vulnerable children and young people’. The Home Office wants to intervene early to stop young people from becoming involved in gang and youth vio-lence in the first place. This guide draws on EIF’s work to look at the risk indicators for gang involvement and youth violence, and to look at the key features of programmes shown to be effective in preventing these or related outcomes. It also draws on wider but highly relevant EIF reports, including our review of social and emotional skills development. We hope that you find this guide useful and we look forward to continuing to support the Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation programme. Carey Oppenheim Chief Executive, Early Intervention Foundation
This Guide draws together the conclusions of work completed by the Early Intervention Foundation to look at what’s known about effec-tive approaches to the prevention of gang in-volvement, gang-related exploitation and youth violence. It also draws upon other resources and on the experiences of those working with vulner-able young people to provide practical advice, case studies and links to further resources.
1. Intervening early to prevent gang-related violence and exploitation
2. Identifying vulnerable children and young people
We’d welcome your feedback
This is a live Guide. We’ll be adding to it and refining it over time. We’d welcome your thoughts
about how helpful it is, what things we’ve missed, and what areas we could strengthen. We’d
also love to hear about interesting or innovative practice in your area, which we can add to the
case studies, or about your experiences of working with individual children, young people or fam-
ilies. Lastly, we’d be very interested to hear about any problems or barriers you’re facing in trying
to implement early intervention locally.
If you have any comments on the content of this Guide, please send them to
Early intervention to prevent gang involvement and youth violence
FILM CLIPS
3. Providing the right support: what we know about what works
4. Partnership working
5. Core components of early intervention programmes for gang and youth violence
Professor Mark Bellis, Public Health Wales
explaining why violence should be treated
as a public health issue, and how early
intervention can prevent problems later
on.
Karyn McCluskey, Scottish Violence
Reduction Unit, speaking at the Home
Office International Crime and Policing
Conference 2015.
6. EIF Maturity Matrix: assessing progress
£5.2bn Estimated annual cost of Late Intervention to deal with crime and antisocial behaviour. For more on the fiscal costs of Late Intervention, click here.
“Prevention is always better than cure, and that’s
why we have a moral mission to provide
compassionate support as soon as problems
emerge...”
Secretary of State for Education, speaking at EIF
National Conference in February 2015
The importance of early intervention to prevent gang violence
and exploitation
WHAT IS EARLY INTERVENTION?
Early intervention involves taking action as soon as possible in response to signals of risks to children’s development and outcomes. Its purpose is to re-duce the likelihood of poor long-term outcomes for children and their families in a cost-effective way.
Early intervention starts once problems or risks have begun to develop but before they get too seri-ous. It requires good assessment to identify the un-derlying causes and a comprehensive and purposeful response.
In the context of gang involvement and youth vio-lence, including gang–related exploitation, early intervention involves identifying individuals, fami-lies and communities that may be at risk of running into difficulties and providing timely and effective support. This might include identification of young people’s involvement with negative peer groups.
ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES (ACE)
ACE refers to the sources of stress that children may suffer early in life. These include abuse, neglect, violence between parents or caregivers, alcohol and substance misuse, and peer or community violence.
Considerable and prolonged stress in childhood has lifelong consequences. It can increase the like-lihood of involvement in violence and a range of other problems.
Early intervention programmes such as parenting support can enable parents to provide safe, nurtur-ing environments for their children.
CONDUCT PROBLEMS
There is a strong association between conduct problems in childhood and later involvement in crime, including violent crime.
Parenting support, aimed at improving the quality of the parent-child relationship, can significantly improve a child’s behaviour.
To find out more, please click here.
KEY MESSAGES
Strong predictors of later involvement in gangs or youth violence can be identified in children as young as seven. The earlier these indicators are identified, the greater the chance of working positively with the child to increase protective factors, build resilience and significantly improve life chances.
Any risk assessment tool needs to be based on an understanding of the strongest predictors of risk. Its purpose needs to be clear.
Risk assessment tools can be helpful, but cannot compensate for skilled professional judgement.
SIGNALS OF RISK
The EIF report “Preventing Gang and Youth Violence: A review of risk and protective factors” (authored by Cordis Bright Consulting) uses the findings of longitudinal studies to identi-fy the strongest indicators of risk of involvement in gang or youth violence. The report groups indicators under five domains:
Examples of strong predictors of later involvement in youth violence or gangs include:
Substance use (age 7-9) Aggressive behaviour (age 7-9) Low self esteem (age 13-15) Low academic achievement (primary school) Delinquent peers (ages 7-15)
To read the full report, please click here.
Identifying vulnerable children and young people
Identifying signals of risk
Practitioners should consider the following when designing tools to identify risk in young people: The purpose of any risk assessment tool needs
to be clear. For example, is it to identify a group of young people who could benefit from a tar-geted intervention?
Any tool should be constructed around the most
predictive indicators of risk and protective fac-tors. It may be helpful to use scoring and weighting mechanisms.
It’s important to consider the level of expertise
needed to complete a risk assessment. Some risks are not simple to identify and require par-ticular skills or knowledge.
The usability of any risk tool must be consid-
ered. Whilst it’s desirable to have a comprehen-sive tool, this needs to be balanced with the time available to complete the assessment.
It’s important to differentiate between behav-
ioural risk indicators such as truancy and previ-ous offending, and explanatory factors such as low empathy.
Behavioural indicators are very useful for
identifying who to work with and will provide higher levels of predictive power but will not necessarily provide information about how best to work with a young person.
The EIF Guidebook is an online resource for those who wish to find out more about how to commis-sion and deliver effective early intervention. It will evolve and we will add more programmes as we do new reviews as to ‘what works’ for differ-ent outcomes for children. The Guidebook enables you to search for programmes by key outcomes, including crime, violence and antisocial behaviour. We have in-cluded a brief section on how to use Guidebook ratings at Appendix 1. It also includes advice on effective commission-ing, including ways to compare costs, benefits and value for money. You can also find infor-mation about the evidence base behind different programmes and approaches at the links below:
The What Works Centre for Crime Reduction Toolkit
Project Oracle: children and youth evidence hub for London.
The Knowledge Hub - Gang and Youth Violence Special Interest Group
Providing the right support: what works?
Click here for CASE STUDIES
GANG AND YOUTH VIOLENCE
EIF’s Rapid Review of What Works to Prevent Gang Involvement, Youth Violence and Youth Crime provides commissioners with guidance about the kinds of programmes which have been shown to work and identifies the following key features of effective programmes:
KEY MESSAGES
There are many ‘gangs prevention’ programmes running across the country. The evidence-base for these is not strong in the UK, so in the majority of cases we do not know if these programmes are effec-tive, ineffective, or potentially harmful.
Commissioners should satisfy themselves that evaluation plans are in place and that they are able to assess the impact and value for money of the programmes they commission.
Commissioning decisions should be based on an awareness the current evidence base, and the key principles of effective and ineffective practice outlined in our report.
To access EIF’s report including
advice on commissioning mentor-
ing programmes, click here.
Seeking to create positive change in young
people’s lives, giving them the skills to make
healthy and positive choices, as well as aiming
to prevent negative outcomes.
Schools-based or family-focused, involving skills
practice, parent training or therapy.
Skilled, trained facilitators, often working with
children or young people as part of their
professional role.
Implementation fidelity: sticking to the original
programme specification and ensuring good
implementation quality.
The EIF Evidence Standards
Evidence rating as it appears on the Guide-
book & website
Classification in future re-ports
4 Evidence-based
3 Evidence-based
2 Preliminary
1
No evidence yet at Level 2
0 No evidence yet at Level 2
-
Found not to be effective in at least one rigorously conducted
study
The Early Intervention Foundation recognises the importance of supporting local areas in develop-ing effective, evidence-based early intervention programmes. The EIF publication “What works to prevent gang involvement, youth violence and crime” highlighted that whilst the evidence base is still limited, partnership programmes that are most likely to be effective
seek to create positive changes and prevent negative outcomes,
work with clients in their natural environ-ment and
are delivered by trained facilitators, acting in their professional capacity.
Such an approach requires well co-ordinated partnership working and a shared specification.
Advice in this section is drawn from our experi-ence of working with local areas and our expert knowledge of early help.
Partnership working
“Preventing youth violence requires a
comprehensive approach that addresses
social determinants of violence, such as
income inequality, rapid demographic
and social change and low levels of social
protection” (WHO –Preventing Youth
Violence 2015)
INTEGRATED APPROACHES We know that several local areas are integrating their work to prevent gang involvement with wider work to support children, young people and families. These approaches often involve some degree of co-location with partners, and require strong information sharing processes. EIF will be looking at the effectiveness of some of these ways of working as part of a wider project to look at integrated early help systems.
Things to think about
It is often effective to consider strategic align-ment of priorities, resources and operational in-tegration. Therefore you may want to consider the specific questions below: Is your plan to prevent gang-related violence
and exploitation based on a full understanding of the needs of children and young people at greater risk?
Are these needs identified in your Joint
Strategic Needs Assessment? Is your plan fully integrated into wider early
help or intervention strategies and consistent with other partnership strategies including the Health and Wellbeing Strategy?
Are your success measures aligned to wider,
shared partnership goals around improving children’s lives?
Are there opportunities to pool resources for
early intervention to prevent gang-related vio-lence and exploitation alongside other negative outcomes for children and young people?
Are there clear, aligned processes for
identifying, assessing and providing appropriate help to children, young people and families at risk of gang involvement, and are these understood and agreed by all relevant partners?
For practical advice from the
Information Sharing Centre of
Excellence, please click here.
Lesson 1 - Intelligent information Information gathered from front line practi-tioners providing a full understanding of the needs of the local community, or through detailed case history knowledge related to the person, group or family. The information should include an appropriate risk assess-ment tool, using the risk and protective fac-tors highlighted above.
Lessons for effective Early Intervention systems
Incredible Years BASIC Pre-School Pro-
gramme - for parents with serious concerns
about the behaviour of a child between the
ages of three and six. Parents attend weekly
group sessions but practitioners visit the par-
ents in their homes prior to the start of the
programme and then keep in touch with the
parents individually through weekly phone
calls.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by NREPP, RAND and
others. See Appendix 1 for a guide to using
and interpreting Guidebook ratings.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Lesson 2 - Clearly defined focus, objec-tives and Theory of Change Effective early intervention programmes tend to have clearly specified objectives and recipient groups and a theory of change which has a basis in evidence or science. Generic and universal pro-grammes seeking to achieve multiple out-comes for diverse groups do not tend to work.
Multidimentional Treatment Foster Care -
Adolescent (also known as Treatment Fos-
ter Care Oregon) - For families with a child
aged 10-17 who is at risk of placement in
foster care because of delinquent behav-
iour. Children are placed with a ‘treatment
foster family’ trained in the MTFC-A model,
which can help to fix maladaptive parent/
child interactions .
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by the Commissioning
Toolkit and CEBC.
The Early Intervention Foundation publication “What works to prevent gang involvement, youth violence and crime”, has identified a num-ber of lessons to be learned for building effective systems of early intervention to prevent these issues. These components should not be considered as an exhaustive list but provides a framework for commissioners in designing early intervention programmes. The evidence ratings included come from the EIF Guidebook, and a guide for interpreting and using these ratings is included at Appendix 1.
Multisystemic Therapy for Problem Sexual
Behaviour - for families with a young person
who has demonstrated sexually abusive be-
haviour. Therapists deliver individually to
families in their homes, working closely with
the family to understand the risks and devel-
op a plan.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by OJP and others.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - therapeutic intervention for children and families who have been exposed to a traumatic event. Based on the theory that children have difficulty processing complex emotions that re-sult from traumatic events.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the
EIF Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, NREPP
and CEBC.
Lesson 3 - Highly skilled facilitators - who
have a high level of training in their profes-
sional field and have been trained to under-
stand the risk and protective factors related
to gang and youth violence. These might be
teachers, youth workers, health practitioners
or highly skilled mentors providing 1-1 sup-
port.
Lessons for effective Early Intervention systems
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) - for fami-
lies of young people who have exhibited
serious antisocial behaviour. Specially
trained MST therapists provide them with
therapy to improve the young person’s
behaviour.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the
EIF Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, RAND
and others.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Lesson 4 - Clear referral pathway
A key element for any successful early in-
tervention programme is the ability to have
a clear referral pathway for any client who
is identified as needing more specialist sup-
port, or for front line facilitators who re-
quire additional guidance.
Multidimensional Family Therapy (MFT) -
for families with an adolescent with behav-
iour or substance misuse problems. Fami-
lies work with an MDFT therapist to devel-
op problem-solving skills for dealing with
multidimensional issues. Referral is struc-
tured, coming from the health system, the
justice system, schools, or social services.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, CEBC and
others.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - therapeutic intervention for chil-dren and families who have been exposed to a traumatic event. Based on the theory that children have difficulty processing com-plex emotions that result from traumatic events.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, NREPP and
CEBC.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Stepping Stones Triple P - for parents of
children (aged up to 12 years) diagnosed
with a serious physical or learning disability,
such as Down’s Syndrome or Autistic Spec-
trum Disorder. Parents are typically referred
into the programme through professionals.
Parents receive a screening call to make sure
that their level of need is appropriate for the
intensity of the programme.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by the Commissioning
Toolkit.
Lesson 5 - Regular and frequent contact
Many successful programmes benefit from
structured and regular contact, for example
weekly and over a number of weeks.
Lessons for effective Early Intervention systems
Functional Family Therapy - successful
with young people and their families. Pro-
gramme provides 8-30 week sessions,
structured around 5 phases - engagement
in change, motivation to change, relation-
ship assessment and change planning,
behavioural change, generalisation.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the
EIF Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, CEBC
and others.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Lesson 6- Continuous review
All of the programmes that demonstrated
degrees of success have built in a continu-
ous review process. These reviews are not
limited to the success and challenges of
the programme. They include staff reviews
or clinically based reviews, and in some
cases have included client feedback .
Incredible Years BASIC Pre-School Pro-
gramme - for parents with serious concerns
about the behaviour of a child between the
ages of three and six. Review is provided by
supervisors from the host agency and feed-
back from practitioners and parents.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by NREPP, RAND and
others.
Well-evidenced programmes including this component
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) - for families of young people who have exhibited serious antisocial behaviour. MST therapists provide them with therapy to improve the young per-son’s behaviour. Review is through weekly conversations with the trainer assigned to the programme, onsite clinical supervision and Bi-Annual implementation reviews.
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, RAND and
others.
Botvin LifeSkills Training (LST) - school-
based substance misuse prevention pro-
gramme designed to help young people
(aged eight to 18) avoid tobacco, alcohol, and
drug abuse. The programme consists of struc-
tured and regular contact both in its intensive
version (2 – 3 sessions per week) and its ex-
tended version (one session per week)
Evidence - Rated 4 (highest score) in the EIF
Guidebook. Assessed by OJP, Blueprints and
others.
Early intervention to prevent gang-related violence and exploitation -
sources of evidence-based or promising practice
The following table sets out a number of repositories which include early intervention programmes to prevent gang and youth violence. In some cases the programmes have been evaluated and have a clear evidence base of success. In others, the programmes should be considered as promising practice but may not have been ro-bustly evaluated. Interventions which have been shown to work in one location and with one population may not work in a different context and not all programmes successfully translate from one area to another. There-fore, practitioners should use these links as a guide and consider each programme both in terms of the local context and against the core components set out above.
KEY INFORMATION SOURCES
(Correct at time of publication)
Source Information link
Ending Gang
Violence and
Exploitation
Knowledge Hub
Online Knowledge Hub network which any professional working to tackle gang-related
violence and exploitation can join to connect, share good practice, and access useful in-
formation and tools. Members of the online network include voluntary and community
organisations, local authority leads, safeguarding and community safety, police, proba-
tion, youth workers and government policy advisors.
www.khub.net
Youth Justice Ministry of Justice website providing a catalogue of programmes including early interven-
tion programmes, especially related to gang involvement and weapons.
www.Justice.gov.uk
Project Oracle Repository of evidence-based programmes with an assessed theory of change. Accredita-
tion standards 1-5 where 1 is good evidence. Includes youth-based and early intervention
models.
www.project-
oracle.com
Foundation
Years
Provides a valuable knowledge hub of evidence-based programmes and case studies re-
lated to child development and early intervention for children and families. The website
focuses on early years from birth to 16 years old.
www.foundationyea
r.org.uk
Information
Sharing Centre
of Excellence
Hosted by Leicestershire County Council, the centre supports local areas in identifying
the barriers to the flow of information in their partnerships. The website provide case
studies on partnerships that it works with. This includes gang and youth violence pro-
grammes, such as the Margate Task Force.
www.Informationsh
aring.org.uk
Early Interven-
tion Foundation
A registered charity and one of the government’s “What Works” centres, reviewing evi-
dence and supporting early interventions activity in local areas, as well as conducting
evaluation and policy analysis.
www.eif.org.uk
World Health
Organisation
Provides a wealth of international research on violence, including research on youth vio-
lence, as well as examples of early intervention and prevention programmes.
www.who.int
Youth.gov A US programme directory of evidence-based programmes to prevent young crime and
problem behaviour.
www.youth.gov
College of Polic-
ing
Provides a number of publications and research studies on what works in terms of polic-
ing, partnership and crime prevention.
www.college.police.
uk
Useful sources of research in early intervention programmes
Manchester Metropolitan University
www.mmu2.ac.uk
There are a number of universities that have undertaken evidence-based research into early intervention to address youth violence and gang involvement. The information be-low provides a useful (though not exhaustive) link to recent research.
Research into the effectiveness of crime and dis-
order reduction partnerships, crime and eco-
nomics, mentoring siblings of gang members.
UCL Jill Dando Institute of Security and
Crime Science
www.ucl.ac.uk
Middlesex University
www.mdx.ac.uk
Bedfordshire University
www.beds.ac.uk
University of Central Lancashire
www.uclan.ac.uk
Liverpool Centre for Advance Policing
Studies - Liverpool John Moores University
www.LJMU.ac.uk
Kent Univerity
www.kent.ac.uk
Cardiff University
www.cardiff.ac.uk
Research into place-based policing and evalua-
tion of evidence-based interventions.
Research into gang violence and the socio-
economic links to gang involvement.
Research into problem-solving interventions and
their effectiveness. World renowned crime sci-
ence research including forensics
Research on evidence-based policing , domestic
violence and sexual offenders, gun crime culture
in Preston, assessing risk and aiding prevention.
Research into the impact of neglect on child de-
velopment and the impact of behavioural chal-
lenges including violence.
Research into exploitation of women and girls in
gangs.
Research into the health impacts of alcohol,
alcohol-related violence, and the night time
economy.
Any approach to intervening early to prevent involvement in gang-related violence and exploitation needs to be integrated with a place’s broader approach to early intervention. Different places are at different stages of the journey of implementing early intervention fully. The full EIF maturity matrix sets out the journey that a local area might go on as it works towards this. It is designed to help places identify what they are doing well and what needs further development, to make sure that vulnerable children and families get the support they need, when they need it. The Early Intervention to Prevent Gang and Youth Violence Maturity Matrix draws on this full tool to set out some of the questions that those leading work locally to tackle gang involvement and youth violence may want to ask of themselves and their wider partners. It offers a way in which local areas might assess their own progress towards a fully integrated approach to preventing gang and youth violence through early intervention. The tables at the end of the matrix are for you to consider and note your evidence for your self-assessed level of progress. We will be developing this tool further as we learn more about what works from evidence and evaluation, and from places that are delivering early intervention in practice.
EIF Maturity Matrix: Assessing Progress
Click here to access the Early Intervention to Prevent Gang and Youth
Violence Maturity Matrix
Appendix 1 - Using EIF Guidebook ratings
How the assessment was made, and caveats In 2014 EIF created an online library of programmes that provides an accessible overview of the evidence on 50 programmes chosen from 15 authoritative Clearinghouses. We did not revalidate the ratings of these clearinghouses (for more details please see our blog). We merely presented this evidence within a single framework of standards of evidence as a first step in our work as a What Works centre. This rating will reflect what these clearinghouses have to say about the strength and findings of the preponderance of the international evidence for a given programme over time. These ratings are not the product of an exhaustive and complete process; the clearinghouses themselves may not include and reflect the most recently conducted and published studies, given that these ratings are not continuously updated.
How to use the evidence rating The majority of programmes in the Guidebook have some evidence of being effective. However, we do not validate them in the sense of suggesting that they will inevitably work, because that would be an over statement of what the evidence can tell us. The assessment of the evidence can inform certain parts of a commissioning decision, but not every aspect – including consideration of costs and benefits and local implementability. Please see here for more detail.
