Applying Sen’s Capabilities Approach to the Delivery of Positive Youth Justice

Abstract

Since 2000 the Welsh Government’s (WG) policy has been to provide rights and entitlements to all children in Wales. However, this is not fully implemented partly due to an underspecified meaning of ‘children first’ and ‘well-being’ and their role in relation to ‘justice’. We propose that clarity could be achieved through a novel exploitation of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to achieving social justice. This would require the identification and mitigation of socio-structural barriers which undermine the ability of a child to live a positive life, a life where they can meet their full potential without harm to themselves or others.

Desistance and children: setting the scene

“…observes that despite the benefits of the 'Child First' approach evident in some youth justice services, practice continues to be hampered by a focus on individuals and families rather than alleviating socio-economic disadvantage. One potential solution lies in focusing on meeting children's entitlements -a concept used by the Welsh government to denote children's access to ten universal resources, including: education, training and employment, sport, health and housing, and consultation about decisions affecting them -to promote equality of opportunity and outcome (Williams and Daniel, 2021), but Gray (2019) questions whether youth justice services can work in more socially just ways when they are subject to offender managementoriented inspection and oversight frameworks. Perhaps the key message here is that desistance is not only a personal endeavour but a process wherein responsibility is shared with social agencies and society.…”