Youth Justice and COVID-19: Courts, Community and Custody

Abstract

In this chapter, employing the dual lenses of children’s rights and ‘Child First’ as the guiding principle for a youth justice system which (at least in rhetoric) sees children as children (rather than ‘offenders’; cf Case and Browning, 2021), we examine how engagement (both practitioners and system engagement with children and vice versa) has been adversely affected (pains) throughout all levels of involvement from prevention work to custody and resettlement, damaging support to vulnerable children, foregrounding them as offenders, and eroding their vital rights as children (as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child), but also considering where there have been gains through rapidly developing practice and innovation. The subthemes of innovation, contact, access, safeguarding and engagement are applied to actions of the courts, community contact with children and the custodial environment. Informing this chapter are policy and legislative changes affecting youth justice in England and Wales, inspections of practice which took place at various stages of the pandemic ‘lockdowns’ and informal conversations held with youth justice practitioners and managers to gain insight into how this was being felt at the coalface with justice-involved children.