Youth Justice Practice Research Articles

Responding to radicalisation and extremism risks for youth: An emerging child protection and youth justice practice issue in Aotearoa

Practice note

The Outcomes of Trauma-Informed Practice in Youth Justice: An Umbrella Review

Findings of high rates of complex trauma among justice-involved young people have engendered interest in developing trauma-informed youth justice systems. Although there have been several reviews of trauma-informed practice in youth justice settings, uncertainty remains about whether this approach can produce the outcomes expected of youth justice services. In this study we summarize findings from recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses to provide an overview of evidence relevant to implementing trauma-informed youth justice. We conducted an umbrella review of systematic reviews published between 2017 and 2023 that included group-based primary studies of trauma-informed interventions for justice-involved young people. Reviews were located via searches of PsycINFO, PubMedCentral, Embase, Criminal Justice s with Full Text, and ProQuest. Data extracted from each review included the number and type of primary studies reviewed, and outcomes related to trauma symptomatology, mental health and wellbeing, and justice system involvement. Nine systematic reviews met our inclusion criteria. Improvements in trauma symptoms, mental health and wellbeing, and justice system involvement were documented in each review. The strongest evidence related to the impact of trauma-focused interventions on posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, but less evidence was available to demonstrate outcomes of organizational level and systemic components of trauma-informed practice. Each review highlighted the need to strengthen the methodological quality of primary studies. Trauma-informed practice should be seriously considered as part of any effort to implement evidence-based youth justice. This should extend beyond treatment of trauma symptomatology to incorporate a broader approach to trauma-informed practice that is organizationally embedded.

In conversation: An inside perspective of youth justice practice and experience

This reflective, dialogue between two youth justice professionals who have lived experience of being incarcerated children aims to provide an insight into their unique transition. Although living in very different parts of Britain, they discuss and reflect upon similarities in terms of strengths and challenges that come with being formerly incarcerated youth justice practitioners. Both authors share their insights of youth justice developments, their perspectives of participatory practice and how experiential knowing can impact relationship building with justice involved children.

Child Criminal Exploitation and the Interactional Emergence of Victim Status

Abstract This article draws on observations and interviews with youth justice practitioners and young people involved in county lines drug dealing to explore the processes by which young people are identified as victims of child criminal exploitation (CCE). The findings reveal that interpersonal interactions between practitioners and young people, specifically young people’s capacity to share information and accept intended acts of care, are vital in producing their status as CCE victims. Yet, a lack of appreciation for young people’s divergent experiences of these interactions can create barriers to their realization. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these processes for contemporary youth justice practice, and by questioning the utility of CCE victim identification as a response to children experiencing harm.

Co-producing trauma-informed youth justice in Australia?

PurposeRecent years have seen significant policy and practice interest in how to best respond to the impact of childhood maltreatment and adversity on young people’s contact with youth justice systems. In Australia, this has resulted in increasing pressure to implement trauma-informed practice, although this is a term that has different meanings for different stakeholders, and little is known about the perspectives of justice-involved young people. This paper aims to review what is currently known about co-production in youth justice and discuss ways in which young people can be meaningfully involved in the development of trauma-informed practice frameworks.Design/methodology/approachA narrative approach is used to present a contextual overview of youth justice in Australia, introduce key concepts underpinning trauma-informed practice and consider the barriers and facilitators of co-production and participatory approaches to the development and implementation of trauma-informed practice.FindingsYouth justice in Australia is widely viewed as in urgent need of reform, with broad interest in developing more trauma-informed practice in these systems. Co-production and participatory approaches are fundamental to the reform process and can help to ensure that the views and aspirations of the children for whom these systems are responsible are embedded in efforts to implement trauma-informed practice.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper presents an argument for implementing trauma-informed practice in Australian youth justice that is based on consultation and collaboration with young people. It does not present evidence about the potential effectiveness of such an approach.Practical implicationsThis paper has direct implications for youth justice practice, in terms of both service philosophy, design and delivery.Social implicationsThe work discussed in this paper offers possibilities for new and different ways of responding to youth crime and maintaining community safety.Originality/valueWhilst the need to re-imagine youth justice is widely recognised, there are few resources available to support efforts to co-produce trauma-informed practice. This paper synthesises what is known about these approaches and offers some suggestions and possible ways forward.

Challenges in the Future of Restorative Youth Justice in Ireland: Minimising Intervention, Maximising Participation

While restorative approaches encompass a small proportion of youth justice practices in Ireland, the new Youth Justice Strategy (2021–2027) aims to include more victims in restorative justice, expand family conferencing and train youth justice professionals in restorative practices. This article discusses the legal, policy and practice contexts of these developments, considering how Ireland has defined, used and researched restorative youth justice to date. It situates the ongoing efforts to meet victims’ and children’s needs, and to change criminal justice cultures, in the international criminological and legal literature on minimum intervention and child participation, analysing the possibilities and challenges facing restorative youth justice in Ireland.

Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context-sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk-based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence-base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk-based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.

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

AbstractThis paper provides an account of an innovative research project that enabled the co‐creation with justice‐involved young people of a transformative framework of practice, termed Participatory Youth Practice (PYP). We present a description of our participatory research processes and reflect on our attempts to rebalance inherent power dynamics when working with marginalised young people. We demonstrate how young people's meaningful participation in research can strengthen their participation in service design and delivery. The embedding of the PYP framework in youth justice practice across a large region in England is a formative step in understanding the importance of young people's participation.

Lost in Translation or a Work in Progress? Developing Desistance-Informed Youth Justice Practice in the Welsh Context

Abstract This article draws upon empirical research conducted within a Welsh Youth Offending Service (YOS) in 2017–2018. It captured staff responses to the introduction of AssetPlus, an assessment tool intended to complement a corresponding move to desistance-informed practice. Given that YOSs are now expected to develop practice underpinned by desistance theories, the article focuses on how desistance theories were interpreted and translated into one YOS. It was concluded that the introduction of the new practice model suffered from inadequate planning and AssetPlus assessment did little to enhance this shift. In an exercise in Utopianism, the views of practitioners and managers were sought on what constituted ‘ideal’ practice with children in conflict with the law. The researchers found some evidence of support for holistic child-centred social work practice that addressed contextual factors. The study was conducted with a small sample of practitioners and operational managers, involving seven semi-structured interviews, two focus groups (a total of eighteen respondents), case file analysis, document reading and observation. Given the size of the sample, the findings are not regarded as generalisable, but rather as raising important issues and pointers for further research.

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

This article presents the findings from a pioneering project between a university and 10 regional youth justice services. The project resulted in the co-production, with young people, of a framework of principles termed ‘Participatory Youth Practice’ (PYP). The benefits and challenges of producing PYP are discussed. We argue that the framework – grounded in Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and ‘child first, offender second’ principles – is a formative step in the process of creating a youth justice system that respects and acknowledges children and young people’s rights and enables them to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes.

Reconnecting Youth: Beyond Individualized Programs and Risks

Presently in the United States, cognitive behavioral approaches are thought to be one of the most effective ways to intervene in the lives of young people in trouble with the law. However, such individualized approaches to youth in trouble with the law, and the risk-based logics that accompany them, say some, often ignore the relationships that young people have with caregivers, as well as the broader social ecological, economic and political contexts within which those relationships develop. Once the individual change work is completed, young people must have productive roles and supportive relationships to return to, especially if we want youth justice practice to translate into justice for youth. Given that meaningful attachments with others serve as the primary context within which individuals learn to regulate emotions and behaviors, youth justice policy and practice ought to seek to repair the capacity to attach and relate –and broader social policy reforms must address the social and economic inequalities that make the adversity and harm that undermine that capacity more likely. In this article, we discuss the limitations of over-relying on skills-based therapies and examine how the neglect of social, material and relational contexts can undermine the meaning and effectiveness of youth justice interventions. Following this, we describe how a youth justice system that attends to relational needs and structural inequalities might better meet the needs of young people.

The changing shape of youth justice: Models of practice

This article reports on a two-year investigation, which maps out contemporary approaches to the delivery of youth justice in England, in light of substantial recent changes in this area of practice. The findings are derived from a detailed examination of youth offending plans and a series of corroborative semi-structured interviews with managers and practitioners from selected youth offending services. Our inquiry has enabled us to develop a detailed three-fold typology of youth justice agencies’ orientations towards practice, represented as ‘offender management’, ‘targeted intervention’ and ‘children and young people first’; as well as a small number of ‘outliers’ where priorities are articulated rather differently. Our findings enable us to reflect on this evidence to suggest that there are a number of ‘models’ of youth justice practice operating in parallel; and that there does not appear at present to be the kind of ‘orthodoxy’ in place which has sometimes prevailed in this field. We also raise doubts about previous representations of unified models of youth justice presumed to be operative at national or jurisdictional levels. We conclude with a number of further observations about the combined effect of current influences on the organization and realization of youth justice, including the growing emphasis on localized responsibility for delivery and increasingly complex expectations of the service context.

Can Human Rights Standards Counter Australia’s Punitive Youth Justice Practices?

Recent practices in the administration of youth justice across Australian state and territory jurisdictions reveal a powerful tension between the punitive imperative of “tough on crime” political populism, and internationally agreed minimum standards relevant to the treatment of children. In questioning the extent to which human rights standards can and should be used as a useful tool to counter punitive youth justice practices, this article identifies major points of discrepancy between Australia’s international legal obligations and the doctrine and operation of domestic criminal law as it applies to children in conflict with the law. Examining youth justice “crises” in two Australian states, the Northern Territory and Victoria, the article concludes that while child rights are not directly justiciable in Australia, global standards on youth justice provide a unifying discourse that is resistant to the vagaries of populism, and which can guide reform for child rights compliant youth justice legislation and practice.

Bridging the gap between research and frontline youth justice practice

Although the Risk, Need, Responsivity model of rehabilitation is rooted in a substantial body of research evidence, several studies of the model’s efficacy in youth and adult justice settings within England and Wales have revealed modest outcomes. In this article, we contend that the findings do not necessarily reflect deficits in the model. Rather, a growing corpus of research now indicates that poor practice integrity or inadequate implementation of the model’s principles is a key but under-researched factor that undermines the efficacy of interventions based on the model. We also present the findings of a study that explored applications of the model in three Welsh youth justice services and we examine possible means of bridging the gap between research evidence and real-world practice.

Four Challenges in the Future of Restorative Justice

Restorative justice (RJ) emerged in the late 1970s as an alternative to conventional youth and criminal justice practices. Since this time, RJ has experienced rapid growth in theory and practice. At the same time, much of this growth has come from expansion in lower-end criminal justice responses to crime, and in the increasing use of the term “restorative” for a widening host of practices and interventions. RJ has also faced problems related to its increasing institutionalization, resulting in divergence from earlier aims and goals. In this article, we set forth what we see as the four biggest challenges facing the future of RJ, namely problems related to definition, institutionalization, displacement, and relevance of RJ practices. We follow with discussion of possible future directions of RJ.

Out of Step and Out of Touch: Queensland's 2014 Youth Justice Amendments

Early in 2014, Queensland significantly transformed its Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld). The amendments included removing the principle that detention should be a last resort, providing for the automatic transfer of 17-year-olds in detention to adult correctional facilities and a mandatory boot camp order for recidivist motor vehicle offenders in Townsville. This article demonstrates that these amendments are out of step with other Australian jurisdictions, conflict with international obligations and are out of touch with the evidence as to best practice in youth justice.

Children First, Offenders Second: The Centrality of Engagement in Positive Youth Justice

AbstractContemporary European youth justice practice, notably in England and Wales, fosters retrospective, risk‐focused and reductionist views of children. Enforced, inequitable, prescriptive and adult‐led youth justice relationships adulterise children and responsibilise them fully for their offending behaviour, disengaging them from constructive youth justice interventions. This article sets out and evidences an alternative model of youth justice: Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS). The CFOS model offers a whole child, preventative and diversionary approach that normalises offending by children and promotes strengths and positive behaviour. The model is grounded in the principles of child‐friendly, child‐appropriate and legitimate practice as a means of engaging children with youth justice services and interventions. Evidence of how these key principles have been animated in local practice is provided and implications for engagement in the youth justice context are discussed.

Diverging or Emerging from Law? The Practice of Youth Justice in Ireland

The Children Act 2001 is the statutory framework for youth justice in Ireland. Fully in force since 2007, aspects of the Act appear to be unimplemented while in other areas practice has diverged from the Act’s provisions. Three areas are used to show where youth justice practice has diverged from the legislation: the operation of the Children Court; the use of community sanctions and the use of family conferences and restorative justice. This article studies the disconnect between the law and practice in these three areas, offers some explanation as to why it has occurred and proposes some solutions for how it might be addressed.

Early Intervention for the Prevention of Offending in Northern Ireland

Policy and practice in education, health, social care and youth justice have increasingly reflected the assumption that the more ‘risk factors’ a child experiences, the more likely s/he is to suffer ‘negative’ outcomes (including involvement in ‘anti-social’ or ‘criminal’ behaviour). This has led to an emphasis on targeting individuals considered ‘at risk’ through ‘early intervention’ programmes. At the heart of debate about such programmes is their intended objective: addressing the needs of any child or young person as they are identified?; prevention of offending based on assessment of ‘criminogenic’ risk factors?; or diversion from the formal criminal justice system for those already involved in ‘anti-social’ or ‘criminal’ behaviours? The needs and circumstances of children defined ‘at risk of offending’ are often the same as those of children ‘in need’. If they are considered ‘in trouble’ rather than ‘troubled’, emphasis is potentially shifted away from their personal development and well-being towards their regulation and criminalization. Drawing on primary research with practitioners implementing an ‘Early Intervention for the Prevention of Offending’ Programme for 8−13 year-olds in Northern Ireland, this article explores the tensions involved in ‘addressing need’ and ‘preventing offending’.

The position of relationship based practice in youth justice

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to consider the position of relationship-based practice in youth justice by looking at how “effective programmes” seem to have been given heightened importance over “effective” young person-worker relationships.Design/methodology/approach– By critically reviewing the literature on the topic, the paper promotes debate on the position of relationship-based practice in youth justice.Findings– It is argued that the young person-worker relationship is very important. A genuine and empathetic relationship can reduce the chances of re-offending and improve the child's personal, social and emotional development. By being respectful and listening attentively to children's “life stories”, barriers can be overcome, potentially resulting in lifestyle, social and behavioural change. However, although there is evidence that developing a trusting relationship is “effective” and that it is a key component of effective practice, what is less clear is how to practically secure the engagement of a child.Originality/value– In comparison to the emphasis on effective programme intervention, there has been less research done on the “characteristics” of effective staff practice in youth justice.