In 1971, Scotland instituted a new system for dealing with children who had committed offenses or who were for other reasons deemed to be 'in need of compulsory measures of care.' Under the new arrangements, children are brought before a hearing by a reporter when they are deemed by the reporter to be in need of compulsory measures of care. The enabling act defines a 'child' as under age 16 or over 16 but under 18 in the case of persons for whom a supervision requirement is in force. The hearing is only for those children who acknowledge that they have committed an offense. Those contesting allegations against them are referred to the sheriff's court. The panel in the hearing consists of three lay persons from the local community. In addition to the three members of the panel, the hearing involves the reporter, the child, the child's parents, and a representative of the social work department. The field study of the operations of the hearings notes the informality of the hearings, which involve considerable dialog between the panel and the child and the child's parents. A significant finding was that children did not express any sense of criminal stigmatization from the hearings. Further, the panels observed generally operated from the motive to help the child remedy deviant behavior rather than punish him/her for it. The concluding discussion recommends the use of a format similar to the children's hearings in America to complement the growing formalization of juvenile justice processing. THe hearings would be for juveniles either acknowledging their guilt or having been found guilty by a court. Extensive graphic illustrations portray the structure and processing of the Scottish system of children's hearings, and tabular data are provided from the field studies.