Youth Justice Handbook

Theory, Policy and Practice

Wayne Taylor, Rod Earle, Richard Hester

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781843927174
• eBook ISBN: 9781317821748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What knowledge and skills do you need to practise effectively as a professional within the youth justice system? What values should inform your work with children and young people subject to criminal justice sanctions? These are the central questions addressed by the editors and contributors in this comprehensive new text.The Youth Justice Handbook provides an essential resource for practitioners in youth justice as well as those who are studying the subject as part of their training or an academic course. Its aim is to equip practitioners in youth justice and the wider children's workforce with an understanding of key theoretical concepts from a range of disciplines that might inform and enhance their work. It encourages a critical interrogation of the ideas that underpin practice by drawing on social constructionist approaches to issues such as 'child development', 'crime' and 'punishment' and related concepts. It provides a descriptive account of current practice in
areas such as community corrections and incarceration, examining the evidence base for this and suggesting – where appropriate – alternative strategies.The key objective of the Handbook is to provide students with the confidence to critically reflect on the ideas and debates that currently influence the work undertaken with young people as well as those that may shape practice in the future. By equipping them with the basic skills of analysis and an understanding of key themes and developments, it aims to further promote their progression as reflective practitioners and autonomous learners.The Youth Justice Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach, and contains chapters from leading experts in the field which draw on original research and practical experience of working in the area. It is divided into five parts: • Contexts of childhood and youth
• Research, knowledge and evidence in youth justice
• Policy, possibilities and penal realities in youth justice
• Reflective practice
• Widening contexts

Part I

Contexts of Childhood and Youth

Introduction

Wayne Taylor

This book begins with an extended chapter looking at children and young people who get into trouble and at the way their subsequent treatment by the criminal justice system is influenced by ideas. Ideas of what ‘youth’ means and ideas about what constitutes a ‘crime’. This first chapter also looks at how the process of criminalization is mediated by ‘structural factors’, including social class, race and a range of disadvantages that come with poverty. In essence, this chapter tells the story of how and why some children and young people are much more likely to be the subject of criminal justice interventions than others. This is a neglected story that is told less often nowadays than it should be. Its position as the opening chapter in this collection is one small attempt to reverse this neglect.

The discussion here is wide and far-ranging, encompassing a review of historical representations of class and crime, an account of the contemporary experiences of social and economic exclusion that continue to blight the life chances of the poor, and an analysis of how the disadvantaged are overrepresented within the present-day youth justice system. Joe Yates argues that recognition of these neglected issues should shape our approach to theory as well as motivating our practice, so that it is effective in redressing these disadvantages. These challenges are taken up with gusto by the rest of the contributors to this volume.

Poverty has a nefarious and insidious impact on its victims. It also increases the prospects of their involvement in the criminal justice system (as either offenders or victims or, more often than not, both). For Yates, this reflects an essential feature of contemporary policy – that the individual suffering poverty, rather than the poverty itself, is seen as the primary problem. This focus on the individual rather than the ‘wider issues’ has a curious further consequence: it identifies the subject of the intervention as somehow ‘different’ from ‘us’, less capable, inferior, a problem to be addressed (or at least managed). This notion of ‘them’ and ‘us’ has a moral dimension that seems to generate a bifurcated understanding involving ‘them’ and ‘us’ which is linked to the provision of services (e.g. the ‘deserving’ versus the ‘undeserving’), as well as class and ethnic-based fears of the dangerous ‘other’. A further crucial feature identified by Yates is the politicization of youth justice since the early 1990s, which has resulted in attitudes to youth offending (and to youth more generally) hardening and has also led to a new punitiveness in the treatment of youth crime and anti-social behaviour.

Rachel Thomson picks up the themes raised by Yates, drawing on sociological and youth studies frameworks to explore the way the markers of ‘adulthood’ – both subjectively experienced and culturally defined – have been subject to change in recent years. Like others in this volume, she argues that structural factors have impacted on the process of ‘transition’, making this an increasingly fragmented and individualized experience. This has changed the experience of growing up, prolonging childhood (for some), accelerating the arrival of adulthood (for others) and fragmenting the previously shared experience of transition for the majority. This has had implications for practice as young people adopt a variety of strategies (including crime) to gain status and recognition.

Thomson’s chapter draws on empirical data from the Inventing Adulthoods study (a ten-year research project in which the author played a central role) to delineate the changing processes of transitions in relation to education, work, leisure, consumption and the nature of relationships within the domestic sphere. In each case it is clear that the choices open to young people are mediated by structural factors, such as gender, locality, ethnicity and class. Significantly for practitioners, Thomson notes the ways in which risk-taking is a normal and natural response to the challenges of transitions (rather than an indicator of problems requiring intervention). She also argues that practitioners, by recognizing and encouraging young people’s achievements, enhance their feelings of competence, confidence and self-efficacy and, in so doing, assist them to develop a prosocial image of their adult selves which will help divert them from criminal and anti-social behaviour.

In the following chapter, Lindsay O’Dell picks up on this account to provide a critical dissection of the moral and ideological assumptions behind the notion of ‘development’ and its implicit insistence on the idea of a ‘normal’ trajectory to growing up. Interestingly, the author draws on ideas from critical developmental psychology which neatly complement those from sociology and youth studies used by Thomson. This gives a stimulating glimpse of what might represent an emerging cross-disciplinary counter-discourse to dominant ideas around childhood and youth.

O’Dell is deeply sceptical about stage-based models of development with their attendant assumptions of ‘normalcy’ and ‘naturalness’. She takes the reader on a guided tour of the recent history of developmental psychology, illustrating the way that ideas about childhood and youth are socially and culturally constructed (a key theme of this book) and reflect a preoccupation with individual pathology. For her, a key feature of the notion of development is an adult-centred paradigm that inevitably fosters a top-down approach to policy-making, in which the ‘voices’ of children and young people are rarely heard. This failure of responsiveness to the views and needs of young people is a theme that runs throughout the contributions to this volume.

The idea of ‘abnormal’ development – and its use to categorize children and young people (and determine the nature of interventions) – is clearly relevant to practitioners working in and around youth justice. For O’Dell the prescriptive nature of stage-based models makes them oppressive, setting up hurdles to jump at specified times and defining difference as ‘failure’. It also involves a number of specific dangers, including a propensity towards early intervention (to ‘nip problems in the bud’) which risk labelling and, in a youth justice setting, criminal stigmatization. More generally, what O’Dell outlines is a system of thinking about children and young people that is inherently exclusionary and where the pressure is to operate in relation to a binary, with young people as either winners or losers, either good or bad, and where, in her words, the ability to negotiate the ‘the boundary between victimhood and culpability is a tricky one’.

For O’Dell, then, stage-based models contain assumptions that ill-serve the reflective practitioner. Instead, she poses a way of conceptualizing growing up as a process of creative risk-taking involving a multiplicity of possible routes to adulthood, each with sufficient room to accommodate the ‘differences’ seen as sources of problems in more traditional accounts. This fits well with the ideas around ‘desistance’ and relationship-based interventions considered in later sections of this volume.

In her chapter, Mary Jane Kehily examines the consumption practices of young people and considers the societal responses this can provoke, including ‘moral panic’ and overly zealous policy-making. Drawing on sociological and cultural studies scholarship, the author ponders the ambivalence at the heart of cultural representations of youthful ‘excess’ in which, on the one hand, young people are criticized for their hedonistic pursuit of pleasures while, on the other, they are portrayed as the hapless victims of a new and aggressive consumerism.

Developing the concept of ‘transitions’, the author looks at the way the social construction of the ‘teenager’ is picked up by the globalized youth/leisure industries to expropriate the meanings young people generate – repackaging and re-selling them back to them at a profit. Kehily, however, is not satisfied with the notion of a hegemony of seller over buyer suggested by the early writings of the Frankfurt school (or the Jam’s suggestion that ‘the public wants what the public gets’). Rather, she is concerned to trace the ways in which young people are able to use consumption purposefully and creatively to respond to the challenges of nascent adulthood.

So are young people the dupes of snake-oil salesmen or calculating risk-takers, using cultural artefacts and commodities to gain social status and recognition and enjoying themselves along the way? Interestingly, the answer to this appears to be that ‘it depends’. Looking at the issues of sexual behaviour, drug use and popular music, the author emphasizes that a young person’s ability to manage the opportunities and challenges of each of these realms will vary in relation to the environmental and structural factors discussed by Yates, Thomson and the other authors in this section.

In the final chapter of this section, Carrie-Anne Myers picks up the theme of normalization and reflects on the power of words within the field of abuse. For her, the time and energy spent defining childhood and youth in terms of the threats they pose or the problems they engender can be ironically counterposed to the lack of emphasis on growing up as a period of potential victimhood.

Acknowledging the significant and growing literature in relation to child physical and sexual abuse, neglect and emotional abuse in both domestic and institutional settings, Myers nevertheless identifies a key area that remains relatively undeveloped, that of teenage bullying. Here she looks at the way processes of normalization seem encoded into the term itself, with many seeing ‘bullying’ as a minor matter requiring a more circumspect and limited official response than that prompted by the emotionally more arresting term ‘abuse’. Looking at bullying and the policy response to this in the education system, the author provides evidence – both statistical and compellingly personal – indicating that bullying is depressingly pervasive and potentially devastating for victims. Again, she is able to outline the way that factors such as gender have some impact on the way this problem is experienced, although the reality seems more nuanced than the view that boys are more prone to physical violence. Instead, Myers provides a vision of the school as a site of potential physical and psychological violence that young people must negotiate on a daily basis. This can be especially distressing during the already emotionally charged period of adolescence. This is important for practitioners because it reminds them that the ‘presenting’ problem may mask deeper ones. For Myers this is clearly the case in relation both to truancy and exclusion, where bullying is often an underlying cause. It may also be relevant to other problems, such as drug misuse.

By arguing forcefully that we should see bullying as a serious manifestation of abuse, Myers raises the ante for professionals, whose responsibility it is to protect the vulnerable – even when these are the ‘unloved’ (and sometimes stubbornly unlovable) young people who populate the youth justice system. Significantly for this discussion, Myers operates from an holistic theoretical model that looks at children and young people ‘in the round’ and not primarily through a social policy lens that emphasizes the problems they face (or constitute) for the professional. This is a theme that will be picked up by subsequent writers looking at the full gamut of issues salient to the health and wellbeing of children and young people.

1

Structural disadvantage: youth, class, crime and poverty

Joe Yates

Introduction

This chapter sets out to explore critically some of the issues relating to youth, crime, class and poverty. In doing this it first explores some of the historical continuities in the representation of class and crime. It then moves on to consider the contemporary context, critically exploring the impact that structural disadvantage has in shaping the lived realities of marginalized, working-class young people and their experiences of growing up and getting by in the economic hinterlands of twenty-first century Britain. It argues that young people’s experiences of crime, whether as perpetrators, victims or both, needs to be considered in relation to structural disadvantage and marginalized young people’s acute experiences of poverty, inequality and exclusion. The chapter concludes by arguing that these important structural issues should not only be considered in relation to conventional mainstream criminological conceptualizations of crime, as defined by the state, but also in relation to broader issues of social harm which impact negatively on the lives of marginalized young people.

Class, disadvantage and poverty

The Social Exclusion Unit in 2004 identified that ‘The social class a child is born into and their parents’ level of education and health are still major determinants of their life chances’ (2004: 10). And, ‘As formed and reproduced by the division of labour, class continues to be the primary factor in accounting for inequalities in health and morbidity, education, income, housing, diet, consumption, and so on. As such it also pervades – albeit largely unseen – huge swathes of policy-making discourses and academic discourses’. However, while class ‘remains the primary determinant of social life’, Law and Mooney argue it has become the ‘social condition that dare not speak its name’ (2006: 523). Poverty and class-based inequality impact on people in a range of complex and inter-related ways (Scraton and Haydon 2002). It impacts on mortality, physical health, mental health, education, work and the risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system as either a victim or a perpetrator of crime. It penetrates deeply into the lives of those who suffer it; as Davies argues, ‘poverty inflicts real damage on those who live with it … poverty is not neutral, not just a passive background against which people live out their lives. It is “aggressive, destructive’” (1998: 146). While poverty and inequality impact on people of all ages, they have a particularly deleterious effect on the lives of children (Davies 1998; Griggs and Walker 2008). Indeed, in twenty-first century British society it is class and disadvantage and the poverty associated with it which place children ‘at risk’ in a range of domains.

In discussions about poverty, as Davidson and Erskine argue, ‘too often, attention is directed at people who are poor rather than poverty itself’ and ‘this focus tends to remove attention from the processes which cause poverty’ (1992: 12). In this way the public issues of poverty and structural disadvantage, and how they negatively impact on the life chances of those they effect, are presented as the ‘personal troubles’ (Mills 1959: 8) of ‘problem populations’ (Mooney 2009) – ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’ (Young 2007) – with no attempt to contextualize them in relation to the social relations that produce them. Young argues that in this process the poor are othered, ‘seen as disconnected from us, they are not part of our economic circuit: they are an object to be pitied, helped, avoided, studied … The poor are perceived as a residuum, a superfluity’ (2007: 5–6). They are also discriminated against in a variety of ways which set them out ideologically as ‘inferior’ and of ‘lesser value’. As Killeen argues this represents ‘povertyism’ and is ‘a phenomenon akin to racism or sexism’ (2008: 1) – a class-based form of discrimination which is often unacknowledged (Killeen 2008: 1).

In late modernity the risks associated with class-based inequality are presented as being located primarily in the domain of the individual. In this context these risks have become ‘individualized’ and social problems associated with poverty presented as ‘individual shortcomings rather than as a result of social processes’ (France 2000: 317)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: a handbook of youth justice?
• Part I Contexts of Childhood and Youth Introduction
• Part II Research, Knowledge and Evidence in Youth Justice Introduction
• Part III Policy, Possibilities and Penal Realities in Youth Justice Introduction
• Part IV Reflective Practice Introduction
• Part V Widening Contexts Introduction
• Conclusion
• Index