A FEW days ago, I was one of hundreds of people packed into the Edinburgh Playhouse to watch a young cast do their stuff in 365, the latest play from the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS).
The production loosely fused the stories of a dozen teenagers who were leaving care.
From a young girl abandoned by her mother to a young mother left devastated after having her baby taken away, all of them were struggling in their own way to com
e to terms with adult life and to deal with the emotional scars of neglect and abuse.
The performances were powerful, though critics gave 365 a bit of a mixed reception, with some commenting that any artistic merit the play had was playing second fiddle to a blunt social message – that society just doesn't seem to care enough about its children in care.
Yet it's easy to see why writer David Harrower was so keen to make sure the message hit home. As a leaflet given to audience members leaving the theatre pointed out, the statistics surrounding the young people who have spent time in care make very disturbing reading.
When research has consistently shown that children and young people in care do less well than their peers in education, it is not surprising to learn that three-quarters leave school without qualifications, and half will be unemployed two years after leaving care.
But perhaps, most alarmingly of all, the NTS pointed out that around a quarter of the total UK adult prison population has been in care at some point in their lives.
Even more worryingly, the number of children in care is going up, and latest figures show that 56,119 children a year – equivalent to 6.1 per cent of all Scottish kids – are now referred to the Children's Reporter, with the vast majority on care and protection grounds rather than in connection with offences.
In March 2007, there were 14,060 children in care in Scotland, which was up 8 per cent on the previous year; and the number of looked-after young people has gone up 26 per cent since 1999.
When the average daily population in Scottish prisons has already topped 8,000, it seems like many more young people could be destined to become prison inmates – unless much, much more can be done to support them.
Of course, there are many people in social services, the voluntary sector, the NHS and schools across the country who are already trying to improve the situation for children in care.
A friend of mine co-runs a small, not-for-profit fostering agency that locates carers and then places kids on behalf of local authorities.
Her experience is that it takes huge amounts of time and effort, hard work and stress just to find one foster carer for one child.
Placements don't always work out; more than half of all kids who have been in care have at least one mental health problem, and children who have been abused or abandoned or neglected have complex needs and aren't easy to care for.
But having spent years working as a social worker, she knows only too well why these children deserve the chance of a better start in life.
The fact is that society as a whole is already paying a high price for failing to step in when these children need help.
The alternative to investing more money in fostering and other support for kids in care seems to be resigning ourselves to the prospect of more and more of these damaged young people ending up in our prisons.
Yet it seems like not so long ago that there was consternation in the criminal justice world at the prospect of the prison population nudging 7,000 inmates.
Now the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice (SCCCJ) predicts that it will reach 8,700 by 2016.
A myriad factors are behind this trend. Referring to young people, the SCCCJ's report actually praises Scotland's criminal justice system for the way it deals with children in trouble, because it is the "most in line" with the requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But Scotland still has a very long way to go to give our young people the support that might one day prevent them from turning to a life of crime.
