Centrepoint welcomes new measures to tackle family breakdown
Family breakdown is a root cause of youth homelessness. Tackling problems within families is crucial to prevent young people becoming homeless, and to reunite homeless young people with their family or alternative networks for support.
However, more could be done to broaden the new government proposals to ensure that all young people benefit. Recent Centrepoint research, ‘Family Life’, highlights the importance of support from all areas of the children’s workforce and services, with professionals identifying families in need of relationship support and signposting them to help. Centrepoint fears that the focus on mediation will primarily be on parents going through divorce. While this is important, mediation services can be extremely valuable to families in a wide range of situations.
Centrepoint would like to see promotion of services, such as mediation online, to all families to prevent family disputes reaching a crisis point in which a young person has to leave home.
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