I spent some of my Sunday afternoon today providing the musical component of a chapel service in a local youth detention centre.

I’ve been doing this for around the last 20 years, so I’m rather more immune than I used to be to the sight of what should be a group of innocent children in a pit of despair and confusion that would be the undoing of most adults.

The girl that struck me today was, she said, short sighted and couldn’t read the words of the songs on the screen. Being an old hand at this, I thought she was pulling my chain, but I gave her a printed sheet of the songs anyway. She sang with some enthusiasm and, after a few more interactions, I saw that she was, as we used to say, a little simple, but with a very sweet temperament – something that  is often the case with God’s special people.

I also noticed that she is a cutter. She has the scars from self-inflicted wounds on her arms. Why do children do this to themselves? Apparently, they are so desperate to alleviate their emotional pain that they inflict physical pain on themselves to take their minds off what is going on inside their heads. This girl is going to be baptised soon; I have no idea whether it will subdue her inner turmoil, but I hope so.

Although I don’t know how she has ended up where she is or why she is in the state she is in, I do know that for many of the incarcerated children, parents haven’t helped much. A child I used to visit some years ago – who when released, re-offended and ended up in adult prison – had a strange mother. One day when visiting him, a guard said something she didn’t like; her response was to jump on his back and try to claw his eyes out with her fingernails – in front of her son. With that to live up to, what chance did he stand?