ANOTHER WAY:A sanctuary on an island off the coast of Sweden is helping troubled youths from all over Europe to turn their lives around. A number of Irish youths have been among its many residents and now two Irish students are learning about its unique approach - which includes training dogs, writes Emer Woodful
GOTLAND. The door of the pink wooden cottage with the white trim is open. All you can hear is birdsong. Outside, the apple blossom trees bow under the weight of the abundant pale pink and white blossoms. Lilacs nod lazily in the breeze. Hassle-less Hassela. Can it be so in a centre for troubled youths, most of whom are referred by the police, and where two Irish youths who had appeared before the courts were previously placed?
"I was afraid before I came here, because I'd heard about staff being attacked in youth residential facilities and when I saw students freely using knives in the kitchen, for example, I was worried, but it's all so calm," says 26-year-old Yvonne Gaule, a mature student in arts and social studies at Cork Institute of Technology, who is just completing a three-month placement.
"We haven't seen any violence in the past three months, apart from some small occasional arguments between students. But the staff always intervene immediately and say, 'hey stop that', and they do. This place has totally changed my view about how to work with troubled youths. The Minister for Justice [ Dermot Ahern] has to come here and see it. I'm going to hound him when I get home!"
Her fellow student, 26-year-old Claire O'Dowd, chips in: "Before I came here, I saw the DVD and thought it can't be that good, it must be some kind of a cult or something, but of course it's not at all, and having seen it close up, I am totally taken with it."
O'Dowd adds: "Until you realise you have a problem, you can't resolve it. It's very far from a holiday camp here. They have to do the work on themselves."
Hassela Gotland started 25 years ago when a married couple, Lasse and Kirstin Siggelin, then teachers in a rural school in a tiny village on the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden, adopted two children from Colombia. They were asked to take more and more children, and the Hassela Gotland project was born. More than 700 youths aged between 12 and 20 have passed through its very wide doors. It is privately run without any state funding, although the state pays for any children it sends there. Employing a staff of 100, it has its own school with customised programmes, an adventure centre, a top class music studio, and it provides vocational training in its dog-training centre, bakery business and coffee shop, horticulture centre, carpentry centre, clothing design workshop and in its Avoca Handweavers-style shop. It is regularly audited by the Swedish authorities and only one complaint against it was ever upheld. The complainant in that instance, a Vietnamese authority, still refers youths to Hassela. Almost half the children at Hassela come from outside Sweden. It is full to its capacity of 60 at the moment and has an immediate waiting list of 15.
Hassela Gotland is unique in that all the students live with families, most of whom have children themselves. Staff live in large beautifully decorated houses owned by Hassela, and work six weeks on, two weeks off. It costs about a third of the cost of similar care in Ireland. That may be explained by the fact that one person covers what would require three shifts in Ireland.
"That's what's really different about this place," says Affi, a 28-year-old graduate of Hassela of Turkish origin, now a drama teacher who has seven students living with her and her husband and young baby, and who had been through eight schools before arriving in Hassela at 15 years of age. "We are with the students 24/7. There's no shift change, so the students can't run away from their problems. We don't believe that you need to punish a child to teach them the difference between right and wrong. We are always with them, if they are angry we stay with them."
She goes on: "The most important thing we do is listen, listen, listen. Sometimes parents are so busy they don't make time to do this. We also challenge behaviour and we also work hard on finding what interests the kids."
Lasse Siggelin looks at it this way. "Some say 'if you give a finger, they will take your hand', I say 'if you give a finger, you will get a hand'."
Siggelin believes that discipline and control are important. "Social accountability is vital," he says, "you always have a choice. We work on developing appropriate behaviour by focusing on and growing the normal and then dealing with the abnormal with the experts." There are two psychologists on site.
One of the most interesting aspects of Hassela is the dog-training centre. It is based around a beautiful traditional-style wooden villa house which also contains the apartment home of 28-year-old Alex Siggelin and his dog psychologist wife, Erica, and their new baby. Alex and his wife live ,work and eat with the students.
"They are coming to my home," says Alex, "and they can be part of that, but there are rules." Here students with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] work with Alex in training German Shepherd dogs that are sold mainly to the Swedish police. They are also used as sniffer dogs to check for drugs in the houses when students have been away on home visits or when there are new arrivals. Alex was a street child in Bogota until the age of five when he was adopted by the Siggelins. Now he could write the parenting manuals.
"Every child who comes here is scared," he says. "The faster you can help the child feel secure, the faster you can start working with him or her the better. A routine helps the child feel secure. Some children are given dogs to care for and are allowed keep them overnight in cages in their rooms. This removes the need for any arguments about getting up in the morning.
"You can't negotiate with a dog. The dog has to be fed and exercised, so you just have to get up. You can't be angry around a dog or they'll get agitated. The kids know this and they learn to become aware of and to amend their hyperactive behaviour. They calm down."
Calm people, calm dogs. Hassela dogs also get 24/7 care. Alex moved furniture into the kennels, a TV, settees, kettles and cups, so that students could sit with the dogs as much as possible. "This makes our dogs more sociable," he says. "They are better able to adapt to change when they have had a lot of close human contact. Just like us. The security forces love our dogs. They say they are adaptable, that they are able to miss feeding times if necessary without getting agitated when they are out on a job."
The kennels are purposely painted a calm yellow. "When I visited Ireland," says Alex, "I couldn't believe the walls of the court were painted blue. Wrong colour, a cold colour. Should be green maybe, calmer."
Alex says we can learn a lot from the behaviour of the wolf, the forerunner of the dog. "Like us, the wolf is a pack animal who always looks after the injured one in the pack. The more you take away from the wolf, the angrier he'll be. He screams: 'Survive, Survive, Survive'. The wolf will do whatever benefits his survival. Likewise, the children who come here have often lost everything. You must reward them and when they see the benefit of what they're doing, they'll do it."
Valdes is a 20-year-old youth, who was abandoned as a child in Lithuania, and lived in an orphanage until he was adopted by a Swedish couple. He had been a heavy user of cannabis since he was 13. "I ended up shaking and screaming and thinking about cannabis all day," he says. He has been "clean" since coming to Hassela last December. Today, he sits in the little green wooden chalet with the white trim, proudly showing me the nine young puppies with whom he shares his room, with mother Sita on a lead.
"I am so happy," he says. "The dogs are my friends. I am now getting a job working with the dogs. I never dreamed that could be possible."
Alex and Erica are about to head off on a week's holiday to stay with Erica's parents on the mainland. However, they are worried about leaving a very troubled 15-year-old who arrived the day before. He had assaulted a social worker and had set fire to a car prior to his arrival. The boy with the spiky blonde hair is crouched down cooing and playing with six-months-old baby Theo. So what do they do? Well, of course, they take him with them. Alex will check into a nearby hostel to see how things go with the boy.
"So what if I can't have a beer with my father in law? No big deal. I do such interesting work and I have fun doing it, and thanks to these kids I have one of the best dog training facilities in the world," he says.
I HAVE BEEN here before assisting in assessing Hassela Gotland. This time, I'm taking a wider look and am helping in the making of a web film with Guardianfilms, London.
It's Friday evening. That means dress-up time. Every Friday evening, there's a special dinner in the light-filled glass-walled main restaurant built around a living walnut tree.
There are candles and pretty white flowers on the tables which are covered in pale yellow linen tablecloths. Tonight, a former student of Algerian origin is being honoured. He had dropped out of Hassela, had come back, has just graduated and is off to university. He is radiant amidst the speeches, hugs and presents.
We meet David Clubb from the Shetland Islands, who has referred children to Hassela and whose work as a social worker for 18 years included a spell in the very traditional youth detention centre, Barlinnie, in Glasgow. "When I was a student, there was a cheap college trip going to Hassela Gotland for 10 days for £50. I came and it changed my life," he says.
David, who has a young family, also fosters a troubled teenager. He is back visiting Hassela for a week with his foster child to refuel himself. What about the view that it's too late in their lives to be intervening with teenagers. "I think that's a dreadfully pessimistic view," he says. "What do you do, do nothing?"
And what of the nature versus nurture argument? "Well, there's nothing you can do about nature, so let's do something about nurture." The bottom line, he says, is "this place bloody works!"
It seems to. Research done by child psychologist Steffan Levin, in association with Stockholm University, shows that 90 per cent of the girls and 53 per cent of the boys who had been in Hassela Gotland in 2003/04, giving an overall rating of 68 per cent, described themselves as being "well established , drugs-free and not involved in crime".
In his book, Minor Offences, Ireland's Cradle of Crime, Tom Tuite says that "about half of teenagers held in the State's most secure unit for young offenders under the age of 16 - Trinity House in Lusk, Co Dublin - end up in adult prisons in later years or are homeless within a short time of their release."
It is perhaps the dramatic quality of many of the positive stories from Gotland that is so amazing. We later meet 32-year-old Tanya Malas of Serbian background, a graduate of Hassela who became an air steward, trained as a pilot and who has moved back to run the horticulture centre. She is married with two young children and lives in the capital, Visby. Tanya came to Hassela Gotland when she was 15 and was drinking heavily, having dropped out of school. Tanya's mother had committed suicide when she was a baby.
"Everyone who comes here has a big person missing in their lives. There is an empty room in your heart, even if you don't admit it," she says. "Most parents of the children here use alcohol or drugs and may be divorced. Hassela gave me love, rules and listened to me when I was sad. Most of my former friends in Stockholm are dead, or are in jail. Only one has a good life I think."
Jeremy Brookes, a 28-year-old psychology graduate and a radio station manager, was a serious heroin addict who detoxed on the long flights from Sydney eight years ago.
"I was eight-and-a-half stone when I got to Hassela, and I'm over 6ft tall. I had been in 15 rehab centres," says Brookes. "Drugs were on my mind from morning to night. I'd be dead if I hadn't come here. The thing about this place is they persist with you. I remember being in a centre in Australia and I told the nurse my wallet had been stolen and that I was leaving. She said: 'Okay, I'll order a taxi'. That would never happen here. The other thing is you're integrated into the wider community here. You're mixing in the real world all the time and dealing with it. I know I'll make mistakes in my life, but I now know I can work through them."
A beaming Jeremy and his wife are expecting their first baby any day. But not all youths who pass through Hassela end up on such a path. One of the Irish youths who went there is now in prison in Ireland. "Yes I know," says Brookes. "He still writes letters to me. I believe he will come good. I think he realises there is another life."
The circumstances of some cases, however, are even too much for Hassela Gotland. Hassela believes that for a placement to have a chance at all, the student must commit to staying for at least a year, that the parents in the home country need flexible support to be held through any tearful homesick phone calls, and that sometimes on home visits, the students may need to stay in accommodation away from their family to keep a sense of perspective, but to visit them and dip in and out.
If the student is a voluntary admission and if the parents of a student arrive drunk or drugged and if they insist on taking the child home, what chance has anyone? Hassela also believes that maybe if students stay for two years or so, they may be better going home to a foster family or to independent living rather than straight back into dysfunction, if at all.
There is, of course, disagreement among care professionals and lawyers as to whether Irish children should be sent abroad for care. Campaigners say troubled minors should be able to receive appropriate care in Ireland, near their family. The HSE has always contended that it is in the context of a minor requiring what they consider to be specialist treatment, the provision of which the population numbers here would not justify. Finbarr O'Leary, deputy chief executive of the Children Acts Advisory Board, says that "it is always a last resort, done with the agreement of the child, in consultation with the family in the best interests of the child in circumstances where other programmes were tried and may not have had the results expected."
IT'S TIME TO leave and it's back to the Irish care worker students. What was the highlight of their trip that's about to end? "For me, it was my first hug here. Yes, I felt this is good and natural," says Claire O'Dowd.
Yvonne Gaule says: "We were shocked when we saw students being hugged, given our history of child care in Ireland. Anywhere I've worked discouraged hugging and advised that you discourage any hug and keep a record of it. We also had a problem being hugged ourselves, but the kids said they were here to help us open up!" They're laughing about this now.
O'Dowd says: "I feel I have developed. We were like sticks when we came and hugging was so natural for them."
Although sexual relationships are forbidden between staff and students and between the students themselves, had they seen any inappropriate touching over the three months? " No, not at all," they say.
We leave them musing about how they could change their plane tickets to stay a little longer.
Could a similar centre ever work in Ireland? "I don't see why not," says Jeremy Brookes, "but it would have to be carefully thought out."
Emer Woodfull is a practising barrister