Within the penal system we meet adolescents who have committed acts of violence in other institutional settings. Their traumatic past is not unrelated to their present-day actings. Incapable of articulating a request for help, they shun the treatment services that are supposed to receive them – or is it the other way around? Within the judicial system, the clinician can set up a treatment arrangement that can tame the link and gradually enable the patient to ask for help.

Adolescence, 2021, 39, 2, 367-378.