Peper Harow, an old country house set in fine grounds, provides a splendid if unexpected setting for its new residents - group of disturbed adolescents, most of them potentially violent. All the boys at Peper Harow have taken some kind of a beating from life. But at Peper Harow the beating has been stopped. There is no regimentation, no system of rewards and punishments to encourage conformity. Instead the community offers to the boys a chance to try out the experience of ordinary life again; to take responsibility for themselves, for others, for the community. To some this would seem a case of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. But to the boys of Peper Harow the task of facing up to the realities of themselves and their circumstances is - as several of them put it to Jim Douglas Henry-tougher than punishment.