We do, as an agency, provide some programming for the girls you're identifying, in cases where child and family services would be involved and there would be one-on-one staffing, but the challenges are great, in terms of trying to keep them safe and away from some of those influences.
As far as programs go, I think the other piece, in the position we are in, is that when you start to look for solutions you are moving outside of the justice department. A part of the challenge is the partnering of various departments. Child and family services, education, and health are all a part of that solution. In terms of a coordinated plan, often you start talking to a gang member and one of his issues is that he has no place to stay.
I think the problem is identified very clearly in the justice department. When we have youth being held in our youth centre and their release date is coming up, we wonder what we are going to do, what we are going to try to provide to support things being different. I think, at times, for us, there is the issue of the fragmentation of the approaches since there are concerns in each department. Child and family services may have a concern, but if someone's locked up in the youth centre, it becomes a justice concern. It only comes back to child and family services upon release, so it's not a cohesive plan. A number of years ago, the province attempted to establish a youth secretariat that brought the five departments of government together to coordinate strategies for youth. Just as a parent does, you deal with all aspects of your child's involvement. The difficulty of making that work and the difficulty of departments sharing not just staffing but funding seems to be the undoing of that. Certainly from my perspective, it held a lot of promise, in terms of coordinated efforts and the acknowledgement that for many of these youth, all of those departments bear some part of the solution in terms of strategies.