Rob, housing support worker, speaks:

Hello, I’m Rob. I’m 41 years old, divorced, with two sons from my marriage (they’re 10 and 12 and come over to stay every second weekend). I’ve been living for a while with my new partner, Tracey. Tracey and I haven’t had any kids together, and I really don’t want any more, not because I don’t want a child per se, but just because I’m really worried about how it would affect my relationship with my boys, who I’ve let down badly enough already by leaving their mum. But, although she doesn’t quite say it, I know perfectly well that Tracey is desperate for a baby. In fact, I’ll be honest, it’s been causing some tension between myself and Tracey. We’re not fighting exactly, but there’s this coolness – coldness even – this sense of things not being said, a can of worms that we could open but then never be able to close again. I don’t enjoy being at home much anymore.

People talk about the work-life balance, and I feel like I’m tipping over too much on the work side, simply because I’m not finding things so easy at home. Work’s become a kind of refuge. What worries me is that, to be honest with you, the exact same thing happened in my marriage. As things got more strained, I stayed at work longer, and of course everything just spiralled. The more I stayed away, the angrier with me my wife got… etcetera etcetera. The difference this time is that I think Tracey is doing the exact same thing as me. She’s working later too, she’s getting more obsessed with work, and we’re not just seeing less and less of each other, we’re sharing less and less as well.

Meanwhile, as work becomes more central to my life, I worry about it more, I set higher standards for myself, and I find it harder to stop or draw a line.

Tracey is a social worker, and I’m a qualified social worker too, but she works in a children and families team, while I’ve moved over into the supported housing sector. I work at The Larches in south Bexford, which is a housing project for young people who can’t live at home and aren’t quite ready for completely independent life. I’m pretty good at my job, I think. I get on well with the young people, and I’m comfortable with authority. I’m old enough to be their dad, after all, and I know I’m not there to be their best friend. Some of the younger staff find authority more difficult, but I know I’m there to challenge as well as to support. Doing the job well is about getting the balance right between those two things. Of course, it’s two steps forwards and one step back all the time, but I feel I’ve helped a lot of people on their way.

I wish I could help Derek more though. He’s 17 years old, a really big solid young man, over six feet tall and built like a fridge. He comes from a family that’s very well known in the area. The Harrows turn their hands to many things – laying drives and patios, putting in wall insulation – but they are also professional criminals. Burglary, fraud, theft, violence, intimidation: you name it. Derek’s dad, his uncles, and his older brothers have all done time in jail.

The family chucked Derek out of the home because he was always fighting with his younger brother, but he’s still very much part of his family. They’re a tough, old-fashioned white British family who’ve lived in the Bexford area for generations: very patriarchal, with a huge emphasis on family loyalty. You do not let down your family if you’re a Harrow, and you do not take your troubles outside your family. Derek’s dad –‘the Old Man’ as Derek calls him – is very much the boss of them all. They’re all scared of him, even though he had polio as a kid and wears callipers on both legs to help him walk.

Derek is involved in all kinds of trouble. He’s been done for aggravated burglary, he’s involved with drugs – crystal meth, ketamine, cocaine – and he’s a really intimidating presence, not only because he’s big but because he has this ‘hard’ front he puts on, abrupt and unsmiling, very much like his dad and his uncles. We had to ask him to leave a couple of weeks ago because of his behaviour towards other residents: being threatening, and throwing his weight around with residents who are too scared to stand up to him. We moved him on into a homeless project run by another part of my agency. It’s basically a project for young adults so he’s the youngest resident by several years, and there’s nothing in the way of staff support of the kind we offered at my unit.

But here’s the thing that bothers me. Derek isn’t really a hard guy. He doesn’t really want to go down the crime route. It’s admittedly difficult to get him to talk in anything other than monosyllables, but every so often I have managed it, and when he opens up a bit, he always makes it quite clear that he really doesn’t want a life in crime. He’d like a regular job. He’s missed a great deal of school and has pretty limited writing skills, but he’s certainly not stupid and he actually says he’d like to get a few qualifications. What he really wants to do is to work with animals in some way. His eyes light up when he talks about it. They really do!

I’m a big man myself and not easily intimidated, so I guess it’s easier for me than it is for many to see behind his front, but I know for certain that there’s a sensitive, hurting, reasonably bright young man in there somewhere, who could really make something of his life with the right support. And what’s more, he knows he needs help. I’m still visiting him once a week at the moment and having some phone contact with him – it was agreed we’d give him some short-term support over the first month – and each time I speak to him he says our project is the best place he’s ever been, admits that he wishes he could have stayed, and asks for another chance.

Of course, the other staff say that’s all very well, but if he came back, it would all kick off again. Some of them plain don’t like him, but most of my colleagues can see the sensitive side of Derek at least to some extent, the side that wants to stop playing the hard man. But even the ones who are sympathetic point out that Derek’s sensitive side only peeks out occasionally, and in between he reverts to being a thug. Apart from me, everyone feels he shouldn’t come back, because it isn’t fair on our other residents who’ve all got problems of their own.

And yes, okay, I get that, of course I do, I completely get that, but I feel we’re just writing Derek off, writing off a human being, and it just doesn’t sit well with me. The truth is that he is as he is because of his family. Most kids who go off the rails have a family that wants them to get back on track: in fact, going off the rails is how they rebel against their family. But in Derek’s case it’s the other way round. If he went straight and got some qualifications and did a proper job, he’d be going against the code of his entire family, going against the wishes of a Dad who he’s been brought up to think of as someone he should unquestionably look up to and obey, going against them all. And that puts him in an impossible position. If he wants to do right by his family, he has to be a criminal, like his dad and his uncles and his brothers. And if he wants to go straight, he has to turn on his back on a family that is his whole world. What an appalling dilemma, when you think about it. This kid is being torn in two, and in a way it’s because he’s trying to do the right thing, trying to do the right thing by everyone. And we just chuck him out to a homeless hostel and wash our hands of him.

Another thing – and here again I’m pretty much in a minority of one – is that I don’t think the other residents are completely blameless when it comes to Derek. Take Zak, for instance, who’s the main one complaining of being bullied by Derek. I know he’s got problems of his own and all of that, and I’m not saying he’s got no reason to be intimidated by Derek, but he is a manipulative little so-and-so, and I’m pretty sure Zak winds Derek up on purpose sometimes and then plays the victim when it gets out of hand. But that’s just what I think.

Anyway, I’ve begged our manager to give Derek another chance in our unit. I’ve told her I’ll take his case on and make myself personally responsible for helping him get past this. My manager’s response was that I just didn’t have the time that would be needed, not when there were other kids that needed me too. So I told her I’d make time somehow. (Christ, it’s not as if I stick to my paid hours anyway.) I told her I really care about Derek, and I’m so convinced I can help him, that I’d be willing to agree to put in some hours of unpaid overtime, just to ensure that we had adequate cover to ensure that Derek was properly supervised. I mean we’re here to help kids who’ve got difficult family circumstances, and then this kid comes along whose family is really difficult, through no fault of his own, and we tell him to get on his bike!