Ask any young person why they or their peers "do drugs" or get involved in crime and they will tell you that such problems stem from issues such as low self-esteem, violence from dysfunctional families, stereotyping (being seen as "bad" because of their age), pressures to succeed at school, fear of being unemployed and a raft of other such issues. In other words they are telling us (the adults) that we are failing them. In a world of collective outcomes and economic rationalism we are forgetting the individual and the need that individuals have "to belong" and be "respected".

Where families fail, the community MUST respond. Mentoring is a process that extends the family for "at-risk" youth into the community.

The Mentor-Mentee relationship, usually consisting of a volunteer who guides, advises or supports another person, is used in a variety of settings as an effective tool for raising the confidence and levels of academic, personal or job-related achievement of the mentee. Mentees are those youth who are generally defined as "at risk". A further definition of "at risk" persons for the purpose of this discussion is "young people who are likely to experience problems such as failure at school, criminal offending, drug abuse, family breakdown or unemployment".

The aims of an effective Mentoring Program should aim to:

· Reduce youth crime and other at-risk behaviour

· Help at-risk young people back into education, training and work

· Enable community members to get involved in solving community problems, through volunteering.

Participant Mentees in existing Programs often have few positive role models in their lives. Most live with a single parent (usually their mother) or are in the care of the local authority with foster parents. Mentors come from a variety of backgrounds assist young people develop their identity and provide them with positive role models.

Mentoring schemes are becoming more popular throughout the world. Reports such as those written by Sherman et.al. in the United States (parts of which are reproduced below) and that published by the Audit Commission in the United Kingdom ("Misspent Youth") point to the need to rapidly expand such Programs as they positively influence disaffected youth.

Independent evaluations of the UK Programs show that 73% of the participant mentees ended up in college, training or work, while arrests were reduced by 61%. In the United States evaluations it was concluded that after spending around 12 hours monthly with their volunteer adult mentors, the treatment group children had 45% less reported onset of drug abuse than the control group children, who had been put on the waiting list. They also had 27% less onset of alcohol use, and 32% less frequency of hitting someone. The program also reduced truancy: treatment group children skipped 52% fewer days of school and 37% fewer classes on days they were in school. These are impressive results.

Elsewhere on this site, we talk about how to set up a Mentoring Program and how you can become involved as a Mentor, Mentee or Sponsor.

Please become involved with us. For the sake of our children.

The studies cited below demonstrate the impact mentoring can have on young people -- giving kids an inside track to a successful life.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America 1995 Impact Study showed that young people with mentors were:

46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs.
27% less likely to begin using alcohol.
53% less likely to skip school.
37% less likely to skip a class.
33% less likely to hit someone, than children in the research control groups.

In a 1989 Louis Harris Poll:

73% of students said their mentors helped raise their goals and expectations.
59% of mentored students improved their grades.

A 1988 Proctor & Gamble study on their mentoring programs in Cincinnati schools showed that young people with mentors were more likely to:

Stay in school.
Attend classes.
Achieve and aspire to better grades.
Go on to college.

A 1994 Linking Lifetimes study from the Center for Intergenerational Learning at Temple University revealed that young people who had older mentors (average age of 65) showed improvement in:

School-related behavior.
Self-confidence.
Personal skills.

The Quantum Opportunities Program (1989-1991), funded by the Ford Foundation, showed that high school students from families receiving public assistance who had a mentor were more likely than those who did not to:

Graduate from high school.
Enroll in college.
Have fewer children.
Less likely to receive food stamps or welfare.
Have fewer arrests.
Become involved in community service.
Be hopeful about their future.

A Partners for Youth study completed in 1993, revealed that out of 200 non-violent juvenile offenders who participated in a mentoring relationship under the sponsorship of Big Sisters of Central Indiana, nearly 80% of them avoided rearrest.

In a 1996 study from the Center for Intergenerational Learning, Temple University, young people who participated in Across Ages, an intergenerational mentoring project for high-risk middle school students in Philadelphia, exhibited:

Less negative disrupted classroom behavior.
Better school attendance.
Improved relationships with adults and peers.
Positive changes in their knowledge, attitudes and behaviors concerning substance use and related life skills.

OVERVIEW ON THE NEED FOR EFFECTIVE MENTORING PROGRAMS

Excerpts from PREVENTING CRIME: WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T, WHAT'S PROMISING, A Report to the United States Congress by Lawrence Sherman et.al.1998

"Communities are the central institution for crime prevention, the stage on which all other institutions perform. Families, schools, labor markets, retail establishments, police and corrections must all confront the consequences of community life. Much of the success or failure of these other institutions is affected by the community context in which they operate. Our nation's ability to prevent serious violent crime may depend heavily on our ability to help reshape community life, at least in our most troubled communities. Our good fortune is that the number of those troubled communities is relatively small. Our challenge is that their problems are so profound."

"A central issue in the disconnection between causes and cures is the assumptions of how these communities "got that way." As William Julius Wilson has observed, "The segregated ghetto is not the result of voluntary or positive decisions on the part of the residents... [but is] the product of systematic racial practices such as restrictive covenants, redlining by banks and insurance companies, zoning, panic peddling by real estate agents, and the creation of massive public housing projects in low-income areas." The result of these forces in recent years has been called "hypersegregation:" historically unprecedented levels of geographic segregation by race and class, magnifying the effects of poverty and racial isolation (Massey and Denton, 1993). Yet community prevention programs address none of these causes of community composition and structure, which in turn influence community culture and the availability of criminogenic substances like guns and drugs."

"Ironically, a central tenet of community prevention programs has been the empowerment of local community leaders to design and implement their own crime prevention strategies. This philosophy may amount to throwing people overboard and then letting them design their own life preserver. The scientific literature shows that the policies and market forces causing criminogenic community structures and cultures are beyond the control of neighborhood residents, and that "empowerment" does not include the power to change those policies (Hope, 1995). It is one thing, for example, for tenants to manage the security guards in a public housing project. It is another thing entirely to let tenants design a new public housing policy and determine where in a metropolitan area households with public housing support will live."

"Thus the major causes of community crime problems are like handcuffs locking a community into a high crime rate. The most frequently evaluated community-based crime prevention programs do not attempt to break those handcuffs. Rather, they operate inside those constraints, attempting "small wins" within the limited range of risk factors they can manipulate. But until the handcuffs of race-based politics themselves are unlocked, many analysts expect relatively little major improvements from programs addressing only the symptoms of those constraints."

COMMUNITY-BASED MENTORING PROGRAMS

"Both the empirical evidence and theoretical linkages to community risk factors gives solid reason to support much more research and development on this strategy. While it does not have the gang programs' efficiency of focusing on the limited number of juveniles committing the most serious violence, mentoring offers the promise of effectiveness across a much broader population. Some members of that population could well become gang members or serious violent criminals. Mentoring could be a way to prevent that."

Theoretical Rationale for Mentoring

"Why should mentoring of a larger at-risk population of pre- and early adolescents be any more effective than detached social workers focused on gangs? Gang social workers, after all, are in effect mentors to gang members. But the general failure of detached workers may be due to their focus on older youths who are already active offenders. Many developmental theorists argue that ages 10 to 14 provide a more promising focus for intervention and prevention (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1995). The power of peer groups may not be as great in that age-range, and an intensive relationship with a conventional adult could be a powerful influence for youths on the cusp of delinquency."

"A more powerful reason for the failure of detached workers with gangs may be insufficient dosage. Given their workloads, they may not have been able to spend enough time with their individual clients, irrespective of age, in order to become a strong role model. A more intense relationship, with "quantity time" of "quality time," between a "mainstream" male adult and a preadolescent or early adolescent boy may directly address several community risk factors for crime:

o fatherless boys; 17 million children now in single parent homes, 25% of all youth and 50% of minority youth (Tierney, et al, 1995: 49)

o lack of legitimate role models

o insufficient "intergenerational closure" with adult influences counteracting peers (Wilson, 1996: 62)"

"Mentoring provides the highest dosage of adult-child interaction of any formal community-based program. Compared to street workers and recreation program supervisors, mentors can develop much stronger bonds with juveniles at risk. In theory, they can gain the power of "legitimacy" (Tyler, 1990) based on a pattern of respect and support the mentor establishes with the juvenile, so that the mentor's approval and attention becomes a valued resource. That resource then gives the juvenile a "stake in conformity" (Toby, 1957), something to lose if the juvenile gets into trouble with the law."

"Mentoring programs described in available evaluations feature three to four meetings a month or more between mentor and child, with each meeting lasting at least for several hours. Community-based mentors see juveniles in a wide range of settings, including home, movies, professional sports, plays and concerts. They may talk frequently on the telephone, with mentees calling mentors as well as vice versa. In contrast to school-based mentoring programs (reviewed in Chapter 5) which generally operate with a heavier emphasis on academic issues and truancy, community-based mentors tend to be involved in more domains of the child's life. They may also provide more resources in the form of entertainment outings. Mentors may be paid or unpaid, college students or adults. All of them receive some sort of training, although the infrastructure supporting mentoring relationships varies. Adult volunteers in the oldest formal mentoring program, the 90-plus year-old Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America (BB/BSA), for example, are subjected to extensive background examination to screen out potential child molesters."

Results of Community Mentoring Evaluations

"Careful examination of community-based mentoring evaluations supports a conclusion that they are a promising approach to preventing crime risk factors, notably drug use. While most of the evaluations show no effect, the most rigorous modern evaluation shows a strong effect at reducing drug use, and clear effects at reducing alcohol use and "hitting" among at-risk children."

"……. one year is probably too short. Unfortunately, that is all we have in our modern controlled experiment in community-based mentoring for pre- and early adolescents (Tierney and Grossman with Resch, 1995). The virtues of this experiment, however, are many, including the substantial risk factors in the sample. The 959 eligible applicants for the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program in eight cities came from homes in which 40% of the parents were divorced or separated, 15% had suffered a death of a parent, 40% had a family history of substance abuse, and 28% had a history of domestic violence. The children themselves, of whom 60% were minorities, 40% girls, and all aged 10-14, included 27% who had been abused as children. As Chapter Four reports, child abuse substantially increases the risk of criminality in later life."

"How much the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program reduces criminality later in life is not clear. What is clear from this tightly randomized experiment is that there were substantial benefits in one year (average) treatment. After spending around 12 hours monthly with their volunteer adult mentors, the treatment group children had 45% less reported onset of drug abuse than the control group children, who had been put on the waiting list.4 They also had 27% less onset of alcohol use, and 32% less frequency of hitting someone. The program also reduced truancy: treatment group children skipped 52% fewer days of school and 37% fewer classes on days they were in school."

"These results were achieved at a very modest cost. Since the mentors volunteer their time, the only cost is the infrastructure needed to recruit, screen, train and properly "match" the mentors to children for successful long-term relationships. The cost is estimated at about $1,000 per match (Tierney and Grossman, with Resch, 1995: 52). While the full crime prevention benefits of that cost cannot be specified without a longer-term followup study, the short-term benefits alone might justify federal support of this apparently underfunded program. At a price of $1,000 per year of drug abuse prevented, the taxpayer would be well ahead spending money on this program instead."