Youth justice

EPDF and EPUB are available open access under CC BY NC ND licence. This publication was supported by University of Essex's open access fund.

Peter Appleton builds on research interviews with care-experienced young adults, and on cross-disciplinary theories of planning and of emotions, to develop a model of planning for young people leaving care.

Alongside the current media preoccupation with high risk offenders, there has been a shift towards a greater focus on risk and public protection in UK criminal justice policy. This report draws together a distinguished panel to consider both the theory and application of the risk concept in work with young people and young adults that offend.

Current youth justice policy aims to introduce principles of restorative justice and involve victims in responses to crime. The challenges involved in delivering this in a form that is sensitive to victims are considerable. This report provides an evaluation of the manner in which one Youth Offending Service sought to integrate victims.

The 2008 UK government Youth Crime Action Plan emphasises early intervention in work with young people who offend or considered to be 'at risk' of offending. This approach includes targeted work with families and a reduction in the numbers of young people entering the justice system. This report takes a critical look at early intervention policies.

This report presents the findings from the first national, representative survey of public attitudes to youth crime and youth justice in England and Wales. It carries clear policy implications in relation to both public education and reform of the youth justice system.

This topical book outlines a model of positive youth justice: Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS), which promotes child-friendly, diversionary, inclusionary, engaging, promotional practice and legitimate partnership between children and adults to serve as a blueprint for other local authorities and countries.

This book challenges current thinking about youth violence and gangs, and their racialisation by the media and the police. It highlights how the street gang label is unfairly linked to Black (and urban) youth street-based lifestyles/cultures and friendship groups.

Qasim gained unique first-hand insight into the multifaceted lives of a group of young British male Muslims who offend after spending 4 years studying them. He unwraps their lives, explores their identities and explains what role religion and Pakistani culture play in their criminal behaviour.

‘Desistance’ - understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children.

Focusing on Ghana, this book explores the intersection of dominant children's rights principles with lived realities. Challenging one-dimensional portrayals, it advocates for more holistic approaches to the study of children’s lives and children’s rights realization in Southern contexts.

Policy development and implementation has a pivotal role in the youth justice system, with a profound impact upon professionals and the children they work with. Presenting original research on a variety of stakeholder policy-makers in England and Wales, this book is key reading for researchers and practitioners responding to youth offending.

Young people ‘on-road’ are often criminalised due to interlocking structural inequalities. Looking beyond concerns about gangs, the book addresses the concerns of practitioners, policy makers and scholars in analysing aspects and misinterpretations of the shifting realities of young people’s urban life.