Towards a ‘welfare + rights’ model in youth justice

Abstract

There have been a number of attempts to elaborate models and typologies of youth justice, which are, in turn, associated with particular jurisdictions and youth justice systems. While analyses of this type represent attempts to differentiate according to specific criteria, such as their implicit understanding of the causes of young people’s behaviour, it is also a matter of debate as to whether these tend to overstate differences at the expense of commonalities and pressures towards convergence. Despite the unresolved nature of these arguments, the article nonetheless utilises the framework offered by the notion of a model of youth justice to develop an alternative conceptualisation, bringing together, rather than opposing, principles of welfare and rights, in order to argue for a progressive and clearly distinctive approach to intervention with young people whose behaviour is seen as problematic, and who are potentially criminalised.

‘Child friendly’ international human rights standards and youth offending team partnerships

“…While there is a lot of talk in the policy documents of 'entitlements' and how 'services are held to account for addressing the needs of young people' (Welsh Government and Youth Justice Board, 2014: 4), it is not specified how this will take place or how entitlements will be legally enforceable. Indeed the same discourses about the importance of 'participation' and 'engagement' in compliance with article 12 of the UNCRC to give young people a voice are already evident in the practices of many English YOTs (Smith, 2014b), as is the stress on developing effective partnerships between YOTs and other social services in policies produced by the Youth Justice Board (2013) in regard to the English youth justice system. Hence the need to define entitlements more precisely and set up monitoring arrangements which are enforceable in law would still seem to be universal to all youth justice jurisdictions in the UK.…”

Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

“…In line with the UNCRC-aligned ethos of this paper, the term "offending by children" is preferred. Globalised, neo-liberal and punitive pressures catalysed the modernisation of methods and practices for generating evidence to explain and respond to offending by children by emphasising the role of evidence-based policy as a strategic driver of youth justice responses [23,24].…”

“…The inter-related neo-liberal strategies of responsibilisation and correctionalism enabled Western governments, working in tandem with a hegemonic group of developmentally minded academic researchers [2], to simultaneously blame children (often disproportionately) for their own exposure to criminogenic influences and to restrict the empirical lens of evidence generation to individualised factors. The corollary of this deliberate reduction of the explanatory evidence-base was the downplaying of the complexity involved in exploring the impact of a broader range of contextual criminogenic factors-structural, political, economic (to compound matters, there is also a history in criminological research and its associated "evidence-based" risk assessment tools of reconstructing and reducing macro influences such as socio-economic deprivation and social marginalisation as individualised risk factors [43,44], cultural, historical, interactional and situational influences [3,23,45] Therefore, a paradox of reductionism began to shape the application of EBP internationally-a necessary, yet potentially invalidating (over) simplification of explanations of offending that offered "an ostensibly neat and coherent approach to the messy and ill-defined complexities of practice" [33].…”

The changing shape of youth justice: Models of practice

“…Others, acknowledging Article 12 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), place the importance of engaging with, listening to and promoting the participation of children and young people at the forefront of the design and delivery of all their services. As we observed earlier, Leeds, for example, has relatively recently adopted a 'welfare + rights' (Smith, 2014b) approach, with a focus on promoting young people's participation, moving towards an out and out commitment 'to give young people a voice and creating opportunities for them to shape service delivery' (Leeds Youth Offending Service Youth Justice Plan 2015-2016: 22).…”