Youth Justice Pathways to Change: Drivers, Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Youth justice pathways to change: Drivers, challenges and opportunities How and why does youth justice change? What is the nature of this change-constructive, regressive, real, rhetorical? Furthermore, what is the focus of this change-systemic, structural, political, philosophical, practical? This paper examines the pathways by which change is affected in youth justice, the mechanisms and processes operating along these pathways and the central challenges to understanding and implementing real change. We begin with the premise that change has been a constant in United Kingdom (UK) youth justice since the earliest differentiated responses to children who offend (see Case 2018), yet the extent and nature of this change has been complex, contingent and contested; oscillating between the aspirational, rhetorical and actual. Moreover, the pathways through which change has been achieved in the youth justice field have been opaque and beset by conflict and ambivalence regarding how to understand and treat children who offend. Throughout its trajectories of change, youth justice has, paradoxically, retained and supported a considerable stability in its organisation and approach and in terms of the outcomes experienced by children0 F 1. Stability has been the product of political, economic and academic investment in particular understandings of and responses to offending by children, which have been byproducts and causes of entrenchment and resistance to change on the part of key stakeholders. The resulting inertia, protectionism and revolution (i.e. repeating and relying on past constructions of youth justice) has exacerbated conflict and ambivalence in the youth justice arena, whilst 'change' has tended towards the rhetorical and stochastic in nature-more apparent than real (McAra 2017). Furthermore, the assumptions of linearity that are redolent in historical narratives of change serve to oversimplify and even invalidate understandings of pathways. Where real change can be discerned, the pathways towards it are rarely linear and predictable and the influences on change are rarely simplistic or directly causal. Pathways are often catalysed by political responses to public debates, rather than effective youth justice practice, and thus characterised by zigzagging policy changes. This has resulted in pathways which are at times chaotic, unpredictable, complex and multi-faceted in nature, with a progressively unfocused and confused model-base, as will become evident.

Co‐creating youth justice practice with young people: Tackling power dynamics and enabling transformative action

“…They are deemed by society to have forfeited their right to have a say (Hart & Thompson, 2009). Indeed, it is telling that over a decade on from Hart and Thompson's (2009) report for the National Children's Bureau (NCB), and the National Youth Agency's (2011) report on participation in youth justice; a coherent model for young people's participation in youth justice practice does not exist (Case & Hampson, 2019).…”

‘They Really Should Start Listening to You’: The Benefits and Challenges of Co-Producing a Participatory Framework of Youth Justice Practice

“…The value of adopting the CFOS model has been evidenced in the approach of the Swansea Bureau (Haines, Case, Davies and Charles, 2013) the Youth Justice Board's participation strategy (YJB, 2016), and the HMIP's framework for youth justice services (HMIP, 2017). While the CFOS model appears to be gaining traction in England and Wales, in line with Case and Hampson (2019), we assert that the continued lack of a coherent model of children and young people's participation in current youth justice practice highlights the need for the development of a new model of practice that is not solely reliant on adultdirected research. By building on the CFOS model, we focus on the co-production -with young people involved in the English youth justice system -of a participatory framework we term Participatory Youth Practice (PYP).…”

Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

“…However, continued economic pressures and sustained challenges to the reductionist risk paradigm have motivated some key stakeholders in academia (not least the contributors to this special issue) and policy/practice fields to broaden their evidential purview in relation to alternative, less reductionist/more expansionist empirical, evidence-bases considered of utility within (and beyond) the youth justice field. This contemporary explanatory open mindedness (i.e., expansionism) has not been necessarily reflexive or principled in origin or motive in all instances, nor could it hope to be in the politically charged and economically driven context of youth justice [108]. Ironically, a central driver of expansionist theoretical, empirical and practice evidence generation in youth justice has been the dramatic reduction of resources in the area and the pragmatism that this has catalysed.…”