When They Have to Go to Court: What Residential Homes Owe Young People Involved in Criminal Proceedings

The intersection of residential care and the criminal justice system is one of the areas most consistently under-addressed in training, policy, and practice guidance. It tends to appear only at the margins of existing frameworks — in the literature on criminalisation, in safeguarding procedures that note a duty to cooperate with police investigations, in the section of a care plan that records a young person's legal status. What it almost never appears in is a coherent account of what a residential home actually owes a young person at the moment when the court process becomes a real and present thing in their life. That moment is not unusual. Research on the care-experienced population consistently shows that young people in residential care are over-represented at every point of intersection with the justice system — as victims of crime, as witnesses in prosecutions brought by others, and as defendants in their own proceedings. These three positions carry different emotional and practical implications, but all of them are shaped by the same underlying vulnerability: the young person will be navigating an institutional process that is designed for adults, conducted in formal language they have rarely encountered, and managed by professionals whose primary obligation is to the proceedings rather than to them. How the home responds in those circumstances — before, during, and after — is not a marginal consideration. It is, for many young people, the difference between being able to give their evidence and being re-traumatised by the attempt.

The most common circumstance in which young people in residential care appear before the court is as victims or witnesses in prosecutions arising from what has happened to them: abuse within earlier placements, exploitation, violence in the community, offences committed against them by adults or peers. The criminal justice process in these cases carries a particular irony. The young person who has survived something harmful is now asked to participate in a formal adversarial process that requires them to recount that experience, in detail, in the presence of the person who harmed them — or to have their recorded account tested and challenged by a barrister instructed to undermine their credibility. The special measures framework exists precisely because Parliament recognised that without adaptations, vulnerable and intimidated witnesses cannot give their best evidence. Video-recorded Achieving Best Evidence interviews, cross-examination by pre-recorded section 28 procedure, live link evidence from a separate room, screens around the witness box, the removal of wigs and gowns — these measures are available and, for children and young people, are generally either automatic or straightforwardly granted. The question for residential homes is not whether these measures exist but whether the home is equipped to support the young person through the months-long process that precedes and surrounds their use. From the initial police interview to the disclosure of the ABE recording to the defence, from the Crown Prosecution Service charging decision to the trial date, from the day of evidence to the verdict, the formal process operates largely independently of the young person's emotional readiness for any of it. Independent Sexual Violence Advisors and Independent Domestic Violence Advisors are commissioned precisely to bridge this gap — to accompany, to advocate, and to support. Residential homes that do not know what these services are, that have not ensured a young person in their care has access to one where relevant, and that have not built working relationships with ISVAs and witness care units in their area, are leaving young people to navigate an isolating process with only the formal criminal justice system for company. That is not adequate care.

When a young person in residential care is facing their own criminal proceedings, the relational demands on the home intensify in a different direction. The care-to-custody pipeline and the criminalisation of children in care are well documented at the structural level: looked-after young people are disproportionately prosecuted for behaviours that in other settings would not reach the criminal justice threshold, and residential homes have a direct responsibility for whether the circumstances that lead to arrest are managed restoratively within the home or handed to the police as a default. But once a young person is charged and the court process is under way, the question changes from prevention to support — and this is where residential homes often go quiet. The youth court process, for a young person who has never encountered it, is disorienting and frightening regardless of the outcome they are facing. The language is unfamiliar. The roles of the various professionals — the defence solicitor, the prosecutor, the magistrates, the Youth Offending Team worker — are not self-explanatory. The pace of hearings can feel either rushed or interminably slow. A young person who does not understand what is happening in their own court case is a young person who cannot make informed decisions about their plea, cannot engage meaningfully with the interventions being proposed, and is likely to experience the outcome — whatever it is — as something done to them rather than something they have had any agency in relation to. The appropriate adult is a statutory safeguard, not a sufficient one. A young person who arrives at court knowing what is going to happen, what the roles are, what the possible outcomes mean, and who has a trusted adult from their home who knows their circumstances and will be present — that young person is in a substantially different position from one who has been driven to court by a member of staff who was not told much and asked even less. The home that prepares young people honestly for court appearances, that attends hearings and advocates where it can, and that decompresses with young people afterwards rather than treating the court visit as a shift task completed, is doing something materially important for a young person's experience of a process that will shape their understanding of justice and institutions for a long time.

The emotional architecture of any court involvement is layered in ways that residential workers are not always equipped to anticipate, and the gap between the legal outcome and the young person's experience of it is often wider than professionals expect. A verdict of guilty — whether the young person was the victim seeking justice or the defendant facing consequences — does not simplify the emotional picture. A young person who has been through an ABE interview and a trial, who has had their evidence tested and their account scrutinised, may emerge from a successful prosecution feeling not vindicated but exposed — violated by the process of being believed in the most public possible way. A young person who is acquitted as a defendant may feel not relief but confusion, because the process itself, whatever its outcome, carries an implicit institutional judgment about who they are. The verdicts that produce the most complex responses are the ones where the outcome and the emotional reality do not align: the guilty plea that feels like abandonment by an adult the young person trusted, the acquittal they cannot celebrate because they know what they did, the hung jury that produces no resolution and leaves everything suspended. These are not outcomes that workers who have not been in this territory can easily anticipate or prepare for. The debrief after a court appearance — whether as victim, witness, or defendant — is not optional. It is an essential piece of relational work. What happened today. What you are feeling. What we understand about why you feel it. What happens next. The young person who goes through court and then gets in the car with the radio on and arrives back at the home in time for dinner, with no-one asking anything of substance, is a young person whose experience has been left unprocessed. The cumulative weight of unprocessed difficult experiences is one of the clearest predictors of escalating difficulty in residential care — and court appearances, for young people who have already accumulated more than their share of such experiences, carry a particular load.

Building genuine competence in supporting young people through criminal proceedings does not require specialist legal training. It requires a home that has taken the time to understand the basic shape of the processes likely to affect the young people it works with: what ABE interviews involve and how to support a young person before and after one; what special measures are available and who makes the application; what the Youth Offending Team's role is in relation to a young person charged with an offence and how the home's involvement can support rather than duplicate it; what victim witness care services are available locally and how to make a referral; what attending court as a supportive adult actually involves. It requires managers who have thought about how court involvement is recorded, communicated within the team, and carried in supervision — because a member of staff who attends court with a young person and returns to a handover expected to summarise it in two lines and move on is a member of staff who has been given no support to process their own experience of a difficult day. And it requires homes that build honest, ongoing relationships with the professionals carrying the legal elements of a young person's case — the defence solicitor who needs to understand the young person's functioning in order to present them fairly to the court; the ISVA who needs a home that communicates rather than competes; the Youth Offending Team worker who needs a placement that attends appointments and contributes something real to the pre-sentence report. None of this happens automatically. It happens because the registered manager has decided it matters and has built the relationships and team culture to make it possible. Young people in residential care are, on any measure, heavily over-represented in the criminal justice system. That over-representation does not diminish by treating the court process as administrative background noise. It diminishes, slowly, through exactly the kind of attentive, relational, practically competent care that the best residential homes are already committed to providing across every other dimension of a young person's life. The court visit is part of that life. It deserves the same quality of attention.