Response to interpellation 2023/24:302 on gang criminals at Sis-homes
Translated from Swedish by AI; the translation may contain errors. The Swedish text is the original.
Summary AI, written in advance
M argues that gang crime has spread to younger children and that the situation in some youth homes is very serious 1. M wants to give Sis tools through investigations into searches, possibilities to lock residential rooms, and restrictions on mobile phones 1. M proposes increased funding to strengthen security and capacity 1. M emphasizes the importance of a unified care chain with more family homes to prevent young people from returning to criminal environments 2. M argues that Sis receives historically large resources for competence development and staff reinforcements during the night. M believes that queues are due to the municipalities lacking capacity. M wants to see a care chain with aftercare and invest in well-educated families. M is working on a fast track to be able to lock doors and close departments in the event of abuse or riots 3. M argues that it is crucial that children cannot have contact with gang criminals, but that they should be able to have mobile contact with loved ones 3.
Written by AI in advance and may contain errors. The numbers lead to the speech a statement builds on; check against the text below.
Statsrådet Camilla Waltersson Grönvall (M)
Madam Speaker! Marcus Wennerström has asked me in what way I intend to work to ensure that situations such as those described in the Health and Social Care Inspectorate's report from December 2023, regarding how the staff inside Sis youth home Tysslinge lost control, cease. Marcus Wennerström has also asked me how I intend to ensure that staff and youth are given the opportunity for a good living and working environment in the long term.
Gang crime has over time spread to even younger children, and this is also reflected among those cared for in the activities of the National Board for Institutional Care. More children and young people have connections to various gang constellations compared to before, which leads to more serious threat and violence situations. Employees are often subjected to threats and violence at the institutions. The situation that currently prevails at the special youth homes where children, young people, and clients with the highest level of violence are placed is very serious and cannot be accepted. Against this background, the government has decided to give the agency a mandate for crime prevention work in the National Board for Institutional Care's regulatory letter for 2024. The National Board for Institutional Care shall analyze and describe in what way the agency works to prevent and deter crime within the framework of its duties. The National Board for Institutional Care shall also describe the most important results and prioritized areas for development in the work.
Security at Statens institutionsstyrelse is a priority issue for the government. Both placed children, young people, and adults, as well as staff, shall feel safe when they are at Statens institutionsstyrelse. The government has taken several initiatives to provide Statens institutionsstyrelse with the right tools, including deciding on an investigation into room searches and body searches as well as the possibility of locking the residential rooms in connection with night rest and for reasons of order and security. A proposal for new regulation needs to be drawn up urgently. We are working to ensure that new regulations, which among other things enable Statens institutionsstyrelse to lock the residential rooms in connection with the night rest, shall enter into force in August 2024.
Preparations are also underway for proposals on expanded possibilities to restrict the use of mobile phones. The objective is for the new regulations on restricting access to electronic communication services and increased control during visits at specific youth homes to enter into force in May 2024.
Furthermore, it is proposed in the budget bill for 2024 that the appropriation for the State Institution Board be increased by 145 million kronor for 2024, by 153 million kronor for 2025, and by 156 million kronor for 2026.
The government has announced that special youth prisons shall be established with Kriminalvården as the principal and that the sanction of closed youth care shall be phased out. A safe and secure environment during a deprivation of liberty is of fundamental importance to ensure children and young people their right to protection and support. Institutions where children are located also need to be specially adapted so that children's needs and children's rights shall be met. By Kriminalvården receiving responsibility for young people who have been sentenced to a deprivation of liberty sanction, there are opportunities for Statens institutionsstyrelse to have an increased focus on its care mission.
The Government has further announced an inquiry that shall review the entire state youth care's mandate and organization. The purpose of the upcoming inquiry is to strengthen the state youth care's care mandate and its part in a unified care chain.
Marcus Wennerström (S)
Madam Speaker! I thank the Minister for the answer. There are important points in the answer, but questions regarding the here and now still remain. I will return to them later.
Let us first state that at a societal level, we often fail to provide children with the secure upbringing they have a right to. In many cases, it may be that parents do not have the prerequisites or succeed in their role. But such failures do not affect the fact that it is extremely costly, both economically and socially, and not least on a human level, when this occurs. Therefore, our safety nets are so incredibly important.
Sometimes the safety net means that children who have ended up on the wrong path in life, sometimes even in serious organized crime, need to be taken into care. It is an important societal function. When everything else fails in the child's surroundings, when everyday life is about violence and drugs and when the adult presence perhaps takes the form of a seriously criminal person, the conditions for the child's path into society are, to say the least, weakened. In those cases, we need a strong society that steps in.
In this description, I suspect that we do not have different thoughts or any conflict, but I mention this anyway because I think it is important to start by stating that we are in agreement that we are now talking about children. It is about children whose home environment or other circumstances, for various reasons, have not turned out correctly. It is also about how we as a society reverse such a development, how we strengthen the child in order to also contribute to creating a possible and brighter future through this.
If we want to uphold society's right to take children into care, it is also a reasonable requirement that the child being taken into care ends up in an environment that is as safe and secure as possible. Simply put: the child should be given the conditions to break away from the environment they grew up in. In that case, measures such as those the Minister describes, for example, the limitation of mobile phone use, are a good thing. We have seen that affect the situation physically on-site at the institutions, where they are used as a tool to create disorder.
My concern remains when so much focus is placed on the crime-prevention mandate that Sis receives in the regulatory letter. It will absolutely mean that Sis can be served information from the police in a different way, and it will facilitate the overall mission. But participation in the so-called Bob-councils will not solve today's acute situation. When the authority, for its part, comments on the situation and how it has calmed down somewhat during the latter part of the autumn in Tysslinge, other things are raised. For example, it is raised that with maintained staff, they have been able to reduce the number of people living there, and that this has led to a better working environment and a better environment for those detained.
In addition, there is naturally a demand for things linked to technical and physical infrastructure and better local intervention possibilities.
My question to the Minister is still this. If a reduced number of places is being requested, how does that square with the Minister's previous statements that more will need to be taken into care? What measures will we see here and now, with a great pressure on SIS institutions, that make it safer both for those who live there and for those who work there?
Statsrådet Camilla Waltersson Grönvall (M)
Madam Speaker! Thank you very much, Marcus Wennerström, for a very important interpellation and discussion on how we strengthen children and young people in society's care!
It is the case that if one is in the care of society, one does not only have the right to care and treatment for the needs one has, but one also has the right to feel safe and secure. It is absolutely the task of society to ensure that is the case.
The situation at our Sis-institutions is a situation that has developed over time. Not a day goes by without me wishing that very much had been done much earlier, because changing legislation in a democracy takes time. It will take time, but I naturally wish that many of these legislative proposals had already been in place.
It is about being able to ensure that it is not possible to have communication with the criminal networks outside. It is about being able to ensure that drugs and weapons are not brought in. It is about being able to ensure that in a highly escalated situation at the institutions where we have the highest security classification, one can lock doors and, if necessary, also lock entire departments.
For the government's part, it is about acting on what matters here and now but also ensuring that we turn the entire policy so that we get preventive measures that ensure that the youths who enter do not to such a high extent need to be in institutions. The places that are to exist in the future shall to a higher extent be in foster homes, reinforced foster homes.
I received a few weeks ago Children and Young People in Social Care, a very important investigation that is largely based on the motions that have been submitted in this chamber during the previous parliamentary term. The investigation covers a number of proposals that allow us to ensure that youth care is secured in a different way, where the focus will be on being able to provide early support.
It is also about more family homes, i.e., reinforced family homes and treatment families, because what we see today is that the care chain is not holding together. The reason why the municipalities cannot receive the fully treated youths who are currently at Sis is that they lack the conditions to meet these children and young people.
It is clear that the young gang criminal will return to the same environment if there is no alternative, if there is no unified care chain that ensures that one returns to society in an orderly and good way.
It also concerns the young girl who has been subjected to perpetrators. Those perpetrators exist and lurk in the background if one is returned to the same environment from which one was once taken into care.
The government is now working on this and will in the near future return with a review of the agency that is today called Sis. That work is also about reviewing the entire Swedish child and youth care. It has shortcomings.
It was also one of the reasons why I called all the parties in the Riksdag this morning and asked them to meet me at the Ministry of Social Affairs for a discussion. This is too important to just be party politics. It is about the future of children and young people, and we need to ensure that there is a consensus and a long-term perspective in how we meet the needs of these children and young people.
Marcus Wennerström (S)
Madam Speaker! I reflect on what the Minister of State says about the fact that not everything is party politics. It is very important.
That is also why I am here today. It is not because we have a party-political schism or extremely different opinions on this, but it is to use the tool of interpellations to be able to press and push as the opposition that I am part of in order for the government to act in the right way.
But let us focus on the employees at Sis, because 2023 was an incredibly black year for those who work in Sweden. More died at the workplace than in a very long time, as far as I know, and when I review the reports that the union representatives for Sis employees highlight, I can feel that it is more luck than skill that not one of those who were involved in accidents in Sweden last year was an employee at Sis.
Somewhere we also need to have focus. How do we ensure that the adults who are at Sis as employees can offer such a safe environment that we prevent riots and other things that happen at Sis that create an unsafe environment? The adults who work at Sis are the children's requirement-setters, but they are also the children's safety if it is restless at home.
My simple question to the Minister is whether we will be able to reach a situation where we can meet the need for more staff in relation to the number of people living in the Sis homes, so that one can create a work environment and living environment for the residents that is sufficiently safe and secure, so that we can avoid situations such as those that arose in Tysslinge during the summer and autumn.
It just doesn't add up in my head that we will reach there. Even if money is invested, much of that money will be eaten up. There are measures linked to technical and physical infrastructure that need to be addressed where those funds will be used. There are also increased costs as a result of the fact that it will now, with great probability, be placed more children in accommodations that already today have a queue in and are difficult to move out of.
Statsrådet Camilla Waltersson Grönvall (M)
Madam Speaker! I thank you very much for the question. It is extremely important with a number of different things, because this is not solved with a single measure.
What I want to highlight again is that we need an aftercare that takes over where Sis ends its care interventions today. It is also important that we have a focus on care and treatment. Today, it is about how the region where the Sis home is located views care and treatment. When it comes to youth psychiatry, BUP care is an important part of this.
We need to ensure that there is unified care and treatment as well as other conditions, while at the same time we need to ensure that the safety looks different. It is also for that reason that the government is investing a historically large grant to increase safety and security both for the admitted children and youth who are there and for the staff.
We have thus given Sis a historically large appropriation. Sis has never received greater resources, and that is partly because the government sees a need to be able to strengthen the security, safety, and capacity at Sis's various homes. It is also about being able to provide better conditions to differentiate and develop the care.
It is also about ensuring competence. Already during last year, 140 million was allocated for competence development and education, something that has also been neglected over time for the agency Sis. This is about strengthening Sis's ability to meet children and young people with very special and specific needs.
Today, the number of positions is being reduced in order to be able to meet these violent situations, and they are also redistributed throughout the day. The situation at Tysslinge, for example, has escalated at night, when one perhaps traditionally has fewer staff. It has also been demanded that changes have been made within the agency and that it has been ensured that there are staff reinforcements at night. This also means that reinforcements are added on other sides.
One of the reasons why there is a queue for Sis today is that it is ultimately the municipalities' responsibility today to receive these children and young people, and the municipalities do not have the capacity. And I understand why the municipalities today hesitate to receive, because it is clear that if you have a young gang criminal man for whom you have no other solution than to return him to the same environment from which he was placed, on these grounds, it will probably happen as several municipalities have described to me: It is a matter of hours before the gang criminals have sunk their claws into this guy again. The same applies to the young girls who have been subjected to abuse - it will not take long before the perpetrators have found them and start exploiting them again.
We do not want this situation, and that is why we are reviewing the entire care chain. This is important to mention when we talk about placements, because on one hand, we need to have a care chain that implies there is aftercare according to what we today call Sis, and on the other hand, we need to ensure that we do not place children and young people in HVB homes and Sis to such a high extent. Instead, it should be robust and well-educated families and family-like conditions with good support to be able to manage this situation. This is part of how we are now building these networks stronger.
Marcus Wennerström (S)
Madam Speaker! Thank you, Minister, for the answer! Tysslinge is an individual case, so we perhaps should not delve too deeply into it. But it is important to remember that everything is connected, and there are societal problems with people who shoot, just as the Minister describes.
I therefore thought in my final post to ask the Minister to elaborate a bit on how the government reasons regarding the measures. I may be reading it wrong, even though I try to be constructive and think positively when I read, but a very large amount of what the government comes up with concerns repressive measures.
It is measures such as locking and removing mobile phones. Note that I also said that it can be a concrete and good short-term solution to remove mobile phones. But I would still like the Minister to, from that perspective, look at what we should do here and now with these children. They are, as said, children, and to return to where I started in the discussion, they also must be reintegrated into society. If our measures constantly involve taking away freedoms, how does that affect the opportunities for these children to enter society later? I would like the Minister to elaborate on that a little bit.
We may not get any further in the discussion on how we concretely solve a situation like the one in Tysslinge. But the value of the interpellation debate is perhaps also to lift the problems that existed in Tysslinge and, if the government had missed it, to focus on them and on the important work.
Statsrådet Camilla Waltersson Grönvall (M)
Madam Speaker! I can begin by assuring Marcus Wennerström that I have in no way missed the situation around Tysslinge. On the contrary, it has made me very, very worried for a long time. This did not start during the autumn, but even the summer has been a concern.
That is why we are working with such intensity to ensure a safe situation here and now. In that case, it is about being able to lock the doors during assaults and attacks on individuals, as in Tysslinge in this instance. There have also been riot-like situations. In these cases, one must be able to close entire departments and ensure that there are powers in place that allow one to act here and now. We are running this in a fast track so that it can be implemented as soon as possible.
Ensuring that our children and young people who are in close proximity to gang criminal environments cannot continue to have contact with the gang criminals is absolutely crucial. It should be a matter of course. However, it does not mean that one should not be able to maintain mobile contact or other contact with loved ones, as that is naturally constructive, important, and significant for one to feel safe and secure, but it is about removing what today also means that one can order drugs and weapons. That has a direct impact also on the working environment for the staff for whom we must secure the situation, and we need staff who continue to work.
We are therefore working together here and now, but also in the long term, to ensure the entire integrated child and youth care, including Sis. I look forward to a continued debate regarding this.
Source: The Swedish Parliament. The speeches come from the open data of the Riksdag, translated into English by AI, which may contain errors.