TRYING to steer our young people in a positive direction - and away from the perils of drugs and crime - is a constant battle for many in society.

How easily and how often the young and impressionable fall into trouble is all too evident from glancing through the pages of our daily newspaper on any given day.

Strong and supportive families form one of society's greatest defences against the scourge of young people going off the rails. Dysfunctional families, on the other hand, can be a source of misery and despair that can be passed down the generations.

The Family Learning Centre is in the business of stabilising and strengthening the island's most troubled families through a process of getting to the bottom of their practical problems and, at the same time, treating their emotional and psychological difficulties.

It is a massive and complex task for an organisation with a workforce equivalent to 11 full-timers and a stretched annual budget of $750,000 that is heavily reliant on private and corporate donations.

Spearheading the operation is Peter Carey, the Family Learning Centre's programme director. He has been with the charity for seven years and he said that never have the centre's services been needed more than now.

"There is clearly a trend of more children in crisis, more children at a crossroads, where they're deciding whether they're going to be a destructive or a creative force in society," he said.

"That is something that if we don't address, then we'll all suffer greatly. That's why we've targeted these people."

Mr. Carey had heard many sad stories from his clients and has noticed several typical themes in the root causes of what brings families to the centre.

"I think the one consistent is that the families we see have multiple problems. They're often experiencing it as one big problem, but when you work with them in a sensitive way you find that they actually have a variety of problems.

"One of the biggest problems they often have is that there has been trouble and neglect in the childhood of the parents that never got addressed. So parents are often operating with a big hole in their heart and that makes it difficult for them to function and to support their children.

"When you talk more generally, domestic violence is a huge theme among the people we work with. Substance abuse history is a big one - but the question is, is the substance abuse the cause or the symptom? You have to treat the substance abuse problem, but you have to be aware that if you approach it as the cause, you may miss the real cause, which led them to abuse in the first place.

"We are also often dealing with sexual violence. Many of our clients, both parents and children are victims of rapes, incest and the like. As a result, you are dealing with people who are not only in pain, but who are ashamed of their pain.

"And so helping people get past the shame so that they can begin to heal before they end up self-destructing is a very complex treatment. But it's a very common theme, unfortunately.

"We are also dealing with people who have experienced academic failure. What often goes hand-in-hand with that is we are often dealing with people in financial crisis.

"They didn't get the education to help them get the career or the social skills. What is interesting is that most of our clients are extremely bright and resourceful, intelligent and thoughtful. They are intentional participants in society, which makes it even more critical they get the help.

"People who are intelligent recognise that cruelty and neglect is unjust and so they act out. Young, intelligent children are often very badly behaved and difficult to manage because they are so bright. They know, 'This is not love, this is not respect, so don't try to tell me it is, this is control'. So they resist. And they do it well.

"That's the kid we want to work with. That's the kid who can be harnessed in a productive way. That's why it's so critical we reverse the trend."

Mr. Carey said the centre dealt with the most personal and private aspects of people's lives.

"People come to us when they're in crisis, then it's up to us to find practical and respectful ways of assisting them," he said.

"Our programme is dedicated to stabilising families in crisis. We combine different therapeutic practices, some of them very practical and some of them very complex."

Those services include family and individual therapy. "We deal with problems within the family such as sexual violence, domestic violence and a drug and alcohol abuse - we really run the gamut of the more serious issues. We work with couples, who have problems or who are divorced, to work together for the betterment of their children.

"We do something called intensive case management. That means we provide a coaching service for families. That means we are not just saying, 'How are you feeling?' But we're also saying, 'Here's your life, you're going to have to address these six things, these three come first'. So we're directive as well. We're not just therapeutic.

"We use different staff to do it, because it can be a real conflict to talk with your therapist about your deeper feelings and then the therapist says, 'Your car's unlicensed, what are you going to do about it?'

"So we assign and it's your case manager who's in charge of your service plan, contacting your child's school, physician, or whoever are the relevant people. They're also in charge of helping families to access other services such as housing assistance, financial assistance, emergency shelter, or anything else a family might need practical help with, like clothing, food or education."

The Family Learning Centre deals with troubled families with children aged between four and 14, on condition that one parent or guardian commits to attend sessions. By careful organisation, Mr. Carey said the centre could cope with 35 families at any one time.

"That is really pushing it though, we have to be very efficient," said Mr. Carey. "We have two case managers, but they have a dual role. They help with the socialisation programme, therapeutic groups, so they're not just talking about change, they're actually practising it.

"One of those groups is called a family group and we bring parents and children together and work with them, some weeks separately and some weeks together, on practical skills.

"We also run a boys' group that's dedicated to boys between the ages of 11 and 14, who are at that self-defining moment of adjusting from childhood to young adulthood where a lot of boys go into a deep crisis. A lot of boys who haven't had their emotional needs met at an earlier age really lose their sense of themselves and their sense of relationship with others at that age.

"That's a group that's very important to us. In that curriculum there are a lot of peak experiences - we do camping trips and community service, things that really challenge them on a personal and ethical level, on how they want to be around people, how are they effective and capable. In what way do they want to be members of groups?

"These boys are going to look for groups to be members of. And they can look for very negative groups or very positive groups. So we have to try and steer them in the right direction. We have to say, 'You are capable of being an important member of a group that will support you. You don't have to go searching for a group that's so desperate for members that it will even take you'. It's our job to help them believe that and that's why we have that group."

Girls in dysfunctional families also faced problems, Mr. Carey added.

"We're interested in developing a parallel path for girls," he said. "It's not that we're less concerned about girls than boys. It's just that the issues that society's dealing with with girls are much more socially acceptable, more tolerated, more difficult to spot.

"The troubles concerning behaviour with girls are typically more on an emotional than a physical level. Boys might punch somebody in the face - girls might manipulate someone into punching themselves in the face! We have to encourage an awareness of that in society so we get the referrals of the girls to start with."

The centre's staff includes two case managers and a director of case management services, as well as two counsellors. Apart from the families enrolled on their programmes, the centre helps many others.

"There's a large number of people we impact," said Mr. Carey. "People who get screened. They come here and we find that they are not ready for our services, so we steer them in a direction to somewhere they can find help.

"Referrals come from all over the place. Perhaps our closest kin is the Department of Child & Family Services, because that is the other organisation that helps families in crisis. When we get a referral from them, we know it's a priority for the community that they get our services.

"But we also get referrals from schools, teachers, counsellors and other professionals like paediatricians. But there is no need for a referral. Anybody can walk in the door and say, 'I'm in trouble, I need to talk to somebody', and we will listen."

Attitudes to the type of help offered by the Family Learning Centre had improved greatly over the past seven years, Mr. Carey said.

"In seven years, I've watched the community dialogue improve greatly," he said. "When we first proposed these services in collaboration with other services, there was a lot of resistance. The attitude was, 'Primary school children are not a problem, they're an easily controlled population, let's just concentrate on teenagers'. Now there's a great sensitivity in this community that teenagers don't just happen - they were once troubled primary school kids.

"It can be too late to change that when they're teenagers, so it's critical to go to younger kids. It sounds obvious, but ten years ago, it was not a popular notion.

"One of the most wonderful things about working in Bermuda is that we have the opportunity to change things swiftly, because we have a tiny population in which the ripples and ramifications of anything any one of us does can be tremendous.

"You can see the community change before your very eyes. So in seven years, I've seen a lot of improvement in people's sensitivites and that is great news for people in crisis because as a society, we're more willing to be supportive."

However, the other side of the coin is that the problems of troubled families seemed to be deepening.

"We are definitely seeing worse problems," said Mr. Carey. "One doesn't know whether it's just because people are being more honest about their problems, but the trend is definitely for worse problems - particularly parents who are in an absolutely overwhelmed state.

"Whereas in the past we saw many parents who were managing to function despite having troubled, sad kids, we're now seeing a lot of parents who are at the point of absolute exhaustion and despair. That is the most noticeable trend, that we see more despair."

Growing up in a troubled family among other troubled families can also cause problems for children exposed to it, he added, as they might grow up to think that domestic violence, neglect of children and sleeping around by fathers as normal.

As well as tackling some of society's biggest problems, the centre also faces a major challenge in raising the finances to fund its own work.

"We are funded mostly through corporate sponsorship. We are trying to establish a norm of insurance reimbursement. That is basically unheard of with charities. I think it's a grey area for insurance companies, how to reimburse not-for-profit counselling services.

"Behavioural help services are reimbursable in standard major medical packages in other countries. That's something I'd like to see happen in the future. There are many arguments surrounding that, one is that it could bring up premiums and scare people, but I think it would be an honest investment in a better society.

"I think average people with average insurance often need those services. We have had talks and we have found the insurance companies are receptive to the dialogue - but we're not there yet. It's a big leap, a gradual progression. Many of these insurance companies are corporate sponsors, so they're not hostile towards us, but it's a new way of looking at business for them."

Government also provides some funding on a fee-for-service basis and all families who enrol on the Family Learning Centre programmes pay a fee, though most cannot afford to pay much.

Many people offer to volunteer, added Mr. Carey, but most of the work is highly specialised. As he explained: "You can't really have a volunteer filling in for a psychologist."

But the centre is developing a course to train volunteers to work with children, to maximise the opportunities for them to help.

"Right now, we're looking to move to the next level. We're having to screen a lot of people and refer them elsewhere. We need more staff. But we're always struggling to fund our budget and that is clearly our biggest challenge.

"When you have to hire professional staff and when you have to adhere to international standards of accountability, our annual budget of $750,000 is extremely lean."

The charity is now seeking international accreditation for its work.

This has been a big week in terms of raising funds for the centre. Wednesday was Universal Day of the Child, the day Dr. Nicholas Perricone, best-selling author of The Wrinkle Cure, hosted a fund-raising lunch for the centre at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess Hotel.

The same day was Community Day when hundreds donated and wore purple and last Sunday was the centre's annual 6K Children's Walkathon.

Upcoming events include an a cappella, candle-lit Christmas concert at the Anglican Cathedral, hosted by Montpelier Re, on December 13. Tickets cost $100. For more information, call 292-9694.

Anyone who wishes to contact the Family Learning Centre to seek help or to be a volunteer should call 295-1116.