Search Results (177)

Diversion is defined as the practice of providing an alternative outcome for children who have engaged in offending behaviour, which keeps them away from the formal criminal justice system. Diversion is a significant element of the Child First approach, and is widely implemented across England and Wales. The increase in use of diversion in recent years has contributed to reductions in First Time Entrant rates; however, evidence regarding whether these measures reduce reoffending is limited. Diversion practices vary significantly both nationally and internationally. Hence, much could be learnt from reviewing the international literature to establish what could be implemented in England and Wales. Therefore, this systematic review aims to explore the effect of different types of diversion measures on reoffending in First Time Entrants. To do this, a comprehensive search of 10 electronic databases was undertaken to systematically identify literature relating to youth justice diversion. A systematic screening procedure was followed to identify studies that met inclusion criteria, data on key information was extracted and studies were assessed using a quality assessment tool. Results were synthesised using the EMMIE framework, to increase applicability to practice. A total of 12 distinct studies were included in the review, with both experimental and quasi-experimental design. One study was conducted in Norway, one in the Netherlands and the rest in the United States of America. Findings were varied but generally suggested diversion leads to lower rates of recorded reoffending than formal processing. When comparing between types of diversion, often there was no difference in reoffending but generally, the least intensive intervention showed the best results. However, findings from one study that considered self-reported offending prompts consideration of whether diversion genuinely affects behaviour or simply influences the detection of offences. This review indicates promising results for diversion interventions but highlights the need for further research to provide conclusive evidence regarding which measures are most effective. Full article

Defining professional youth work and its activities presents a challenge for developing international consensus in the university level training and education of professional youth workers. This research is concerned with the question of ‘how youth work students in universities are educated and prepared for professional youth work practice, and, in particular, with diverse young people’. The article presents research examining the experiences of those undertaking the education and training of professional youth workers in universities located in five countries: Estonia, Croatia, Macedonia, Ireland and Australia. Educators from a university in each of the five participating countries completed a survey on the content and underpinning values of their course, and educators from each university participated in a focus group interview discussing their motivations to teach youth work, theoretical underpinnings, and pedagogical practices. The article finds that across the five national contexts there is broad agreement among the university youth work educators that youth work is a ‘social and critical pedagogic’ practice with a commitment to broad values of ‘social justice’ and ‘social inclusion’ for young people. However, the specific expression of these concepts differs depending on the national context, often influenced by historical and political events. The personal values, worldviews, and biographies of youth work educators play a role, both in the conception of themselves as educators, as well as their motivations and teaching practice. Educators also stressed the importance of youth work as a profession and distinct academic discipline, especially in the context of neoliberal pressures in universities that seek to conflate youth work with similar disciplines and areas of study. Full article

Rebetiko, as a musical genre, has a very limited presence in Greek school music education, potentially due to its historical association with social marginalization. This paper describes the development and implementation of the educational project “A Journey to Rebetiko,” conducted by students of the Department of Music Studies at the Ionian University in six high schools in Corfu during the 2023–2024 academic year. The project, with a duration of two academic hours, featured a short musical drama performance, an open discussion between university and high school students, and a set of collaborative group music activities. The primary objective of this research was to investigate how adolescents and university students engaged with rebetiko and how the genre facilitated discussions on issues of social justice, poverty, xenophobia, and refugeeism. Adopting a qualitative methodology, the study was framed by the principles of critical pedagogy, which guided the project’s scope, the dialogue-based activities (focusing on solidarity, democracy, and active citizenship), and the collaborative group work. Data collection was based on: (a) students’ reflective diaries, (b) the researcher’s reflective journal, and (c) an analysis of original song lyrics composed by the students. The research contributes to the ongoing dialogue on whether rebetiko can offer a transformative musical experience for today’s youth and explores how critical pedagogy can foster a more relevant, inclusive, and student-centred music education. Full article

Youth leadership plays an important role in addressing social challenges within environments with limited resources and institutional constraints. However, there is still a paucity of research that has examined how leadership develops in practice while facing such circumstances. In response, this study explores how participation in the Youth Citizens Action Programme (YCAP) in South African schools contributes to the development of leadership for social justice among young people, adopting a micro-macro lens. A qualitative, exploratory, and contextual design was adopted, using semi-structured interviews with nine purposively selected YCAP alumni. The results show that youth leadership for social justice emerges through young people’s responses to macro-level institutional inequalities as they must identify and address local social justice challenges. As a result, they develop a leadership identity at the micro level and the application of leadership skills as a micro-bridge. Furthermore, enabling and restricting macro-level conditions determine the extent to which youth leadership can be sustained. The results advance the idea that organised programmes such as YCAP may support meaningful youth participation and provide insight into how such initiatives can enable young people to address social justice challenges as leaders within their communities. Full article

This paper offers a theoretical reinterpretation of the groundbreaking Greentown study using Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice. Rather than presenting new empirical findings, it examines previously published research to study children’s involvement in organised crime networks through a relational, practice-based lens. Dominant approaches to youth offending and gang participation tend to focus on individual risk factors, programme effectiveness or structural indicators and can struggle to account for the enduring social logics through which criminal authority is reproduced across generations. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of field, capital and symbolic power, the paper interprets Greentown as a localised social field in which a core family network accumulates and deploys social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital to secure compliance, cultivate loyalty and sustain informal forms of governance. Attention is paid to the role of symbolic narratives and mythmaking in minimising the visible presence of the state and normalising participation for young people and residents. The analysis illustrates how such symbolic orders can persist even where individual agents desist, contributing to the relative stability of networked harm. The paper argues that Bourdieu provides a coherent and theoretically disciplined framework for understanding organised criminal networks as socially embedded fields and suggests that interventions attentive to symbolic power and misrecognition may complement existing criminal justice responses. While explicitly interpretive in scope, the paper points towards the value of theory-led re-readings of empirical research for addressing the complex and ‘wicked’ nature of organised networked offending. Full article

This article examines how Ecuadorian national digital newspapers represented adolescents and youth-coded young adults associated with crime during 2025, with particular attention to lexical labeling, moral attribution, visual framing, editorial prominence, news values and the near-presence or absence of educational discourse. The study is based on qualitative content analysis of Spanish-language digital press coverage published in El Universo, El Comercio, Extra, La Hora, GK, Primicias, Vistazo, El Mercurio and Expreso across seven journalistic genres: news, note, feature article, report, editorial, interview and chronicle. The article argues that media discourse does not merely describe youth violence; it actively constructs public intelligibility about who young people are, how danger is recognized and whether social responses are imagined in punitive, preventive or restorative terms. Grounded in media framing theory, news values, moral panic studies, child-friendly justice, critical sociology, school push-out scholarship and philosophies of education and human development, the article shows the inferential route from media representation to educational reintegration: when coverage individualizes adolescent violence, minimizes school interruption and masks structural conditions, it narrows the policy imagination through which young people are understood as educable, rights-bearing and recoverable subjects. The paper ultimately argues that the long-term reduction of violence in Ecuador requires not only security responses but also an integral reintegration agenda centered on education, dignified work, child-sensitive justice and restorative social policy. Full article

Growing evidence on the collateral consequences of youth incarceration, combined with increased attention to developmentally appropriate and trauma-informed care, has advanced national reform efforts aimed at rethinking youth confinement. While attention to trauma-informed care and developmentally appropriate approaches within juvenile justice systems is important, the structural barriers inherent in secure settings limit their potential. As a result, a concentrated focus on decarceration offers greater promise for promoting healthy youth outcomes. The movement toward decarceration emphasizes community-based services grounded in empirical evidence demonstrating that rehabilitation and positive adolescent development are more effectively achieved outside secure facilities. Additionally, an often-overlooked component of this shift is the role of probation, which remains the most common disposition for youth who come in contact with the justice system. Probation can either extend formal system involvement or serve as a bridge to community-based services, thereby influencing the success of decarceration efforts. This paper argues that prioritizing decarceration, while strengthening community capacity and thoughtfully restructuring probation, offers the most promising path for promoting healthy outcomes for youth, families, and communities. Full article

Developmental and life-course criminology (DLC) has been the epicenter of criminology for over 35 years. The onset of DLC began with theoretical models that sought to better understand the development of antisocial and criminal activity. Then, with the ‘aging’ of longitudinal studies and the development of advanced quantitative methods, researchers began to empirically test DLC-related hypotheses and propositions. While the extant research base has been extensive, less work has considered how findings from DLC research can inform justice policy. By reviewing key insights from the extant research, this essay focuses on how DLC-related research has made policy gains and, more importantly, how it can lead to more informed decision making surrounding youthful offenders. Full article

Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) is a trauma-informed program for justice-involved young people aged 12–18 years, recognising that experience and use of violence are often interconnected and may involve serious criminal behaviour, including vulnerability to criminal exploitation. NNN addresses a gap in evidence-based, culturally responsive tertiary interventions for this cohort in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia, integrating dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) principles with Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing, co-designed through community-based participatory research (CBPR) with Aboriginal community members, young people, and frontline practitioners. The program aims to strengthen skills for self-awareness, self-regulation and healthy connection through relational, creative, and participatory approaches. Using a realist evaluation framework, this paper examines what works in NNN, for whom, and under what circumstances. Drawing on participant session ratings, practitioner observations, program documentation, and interviews, findings are organised across four domains: effects, mechanisms, moderators, and implementation. Indicative findings show that engagement, emerging changes in the narratives of self, and developing skills for self-regulation were most evident when trauma-informed and culturally safe practice was enacted within genuinely relational, strengths-based encounters. These conditions are identified and discussed as transferable principles for the field, key amongst them that intervention readiness must be treated as a capacity to be actively built rather than a precondition to be screened for; and that creative, participant-led methods represent an epistemological commitment to whose knowledge counts in practice. This case study contributes to a critically underserved evidence base by documenting not only what a tertiary youth violence intervention looks like, but the conditions under which it begins to work and for whom. Full article

Politics and policy are centrally implicated in the socio-historical construction of youth justice responses, yet the contexts, mechanisms, and processes influencing the ‘making’ of youth justice policy remain under-researched and poorly understood. The limited research evidence base devoted to youth justice policy-making (YJPM) has tended towards reductionist conceptualisations of ‘policy’ as restricted, static outcomes produced by governmental policy ‘actors’. However, privileging the YJPM status and role of senior governmental policy actors serves to reify their claims to being the ‘expert’ youth justice knowledge holders. This legitimises their exercise of power and ‘governance’ over non-governmental groups (e.g., civil servants, frontline practitioners, and academics) by dominating knowledge creation and claims to expertise in policy-making contexts. This research, therefore, seeks to identify and elaborate these complex, relational, and dynamic contexts and the attendant mechanisms of change that interact to drive YJPM. Semi-structured interviews with different stakeholder groups across youth justice contexts identified distal (macro) and proximal (meso/micro) contexts—mechanism relationships that drive YJPM. We conclude that the dynamic influence of organisational and professional identity (i.e., self-identity and identity assigned to others) is significant across contextualised mechanisms of YJPM, particularly the perceived identity, status, and role of the expert who attributes the credentials to contribute effectively to policy-making processes. This, in turn, leads us to discern and discuss three distinct characterisations of the youth justice policy–evidence–expertise nexus, namely: (i) evidence-endorsed policy; (ii) evidence-based policy; and (iii) evidence-enhanced policy. Full article

The inception of Jamaica’s education system was built based on European settler colonial ideologies and White supremacist logic. Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery and over six decades after independence from British rule, colonial vestiges pervade Jamaican education policy and practice, resulting in the continued marginalisation of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Despite the commissioning of multiple reports on the state of the education system, these racist and classist injustices persist. In this article, we examine social justice issues at the nexus of national education policy and school leadership practice in Jamaican public schools based on our reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with two Jamaican education policymakers, five education researchers and four public school leaders, alongside Jamaica’s National Student Dress and Grooming Policy Guidelines 2018. Our findings highlight a hierarchical relationship among stakeholder groups in the creation and implementation of Jamaican education policy. Our findings also highlight four themes suggesting that this results from deeply ingrained valorisation of Eurocentric values in policy design that leads to heightened tensions between the Ministry of Education and Youth (MOEY) and school administrators at the level of policy implementation, distraction of school staff from teaching and learning, and disproportionate exclusion of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Implications from our study are the need for stronger cohesion among education policy stakeholders, the incorporation of social justice in teacher and leader preparation and the integration of critical pedagogies at all levels of the Jamaican education system. Full article

Diversionary programs in the United States juvenile justice system were designed to redirect youth from formal legal processing towards services such as treatment, community service, or counseling. Alternative to Detention (ATD) emerged as a key strategy to reduce youth incarceration, though research suggests these programs often provide inconsistent and short-term benefits. Despite these limitations, ATD remains one of the primary, and frequently sole, methods funded and implemented by courts and stakeholders as a diversionary strategy. This article introduces Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a community-based non-profit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and describes how the Integrated Model of Juvenile Justice (IMJJ) is applied through universal, selective, and indicated interventions. As a community-based, multi-level approach, YES offers a holistic, practice-based model of prevention, mentorship, and family engagement, with implications for policy and community-driven juvenile justice reform. Full article

HM Inspectorate of Probation is committed to building and utilising the evidence base for high-quality youth justice services, and to promoting excellence and having a positive impact upon those inspected and the wider sector. Research evidence and inspection findings are used to inform understanding of what helps and what hinders services and to consider system-wide change. In this article, the latest inspection and research findings in relation to the high-profile areas of serious youth violence and criminal exploitation are highlighted. The article encompasses insights from core and thematic inspections, including those from recent joint targeted area inspections (JTAIs) undertaken with other inspectorates. Alongside the JTAIs which examined multi-agency responses to serious youth violence, research was commissioned to hear directly from children and families about their experiences. Other research commissioned and published by the Inspectorate has emphasised the importance of implementing relational, child-centred and trauma-informed approaches and to optimising collaborative/partnership working across agencies and sectors. Reports have also drawn attention to the value of paying attention to the socio-ecological framework, systemic resilience, adultification biases, and both contextual and transitional safeguarding. Full article

Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and those defined as ‘neurodiverse’ are significantly over-represented in the English and Welsh youth (juvenile) justice system (YJS). Evidence points to a number of significant challenges in neurodiverse children’s lives before entering the justice system that increase the likelihood of criminalisation. Then, once in the youth justice system, they encounter further challenges that are both harmful and arguably inconsistent with their human rights. This paper discusses research showing that neurodiverse children often have their rights compromised both prior to and throughout their involvement with the youth justice system. The concluding section of the paper will focus on best practices and recent developments in England and Wales that seek to close the rights gap for this group of children. It is hoped that, by considering both the advances and challenges in England and Wales, the paper will provide a useful case study for international jurisdictions seeking to close this gap for neurodiverse children in youth justice systems. Full article

Endemic racism, operationalized through exclusionary discipline practices contributes to the “spirit murdering” of youth of color in schools. While the school-to-prison pipeline frames the funneling of students into the (in)justice system, the school-to-prison nexus expands this understanding by interrogating the reality that schools are prison for many. Thus, education abolitionists call for a systemic account of “schooling” to embrace creative risk and radical possibility in the pursuit of liberation. However, existing literature has not substantively centered the voices of youth directly involved in these carceral systems, nor invited them to dream. This study asks: based on formerly incarcerated students’ experiences in school and prison, what must educational systems do to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline? Guided by qualitative methods, we conducted semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated college students (four women, two men; majority Latinx/Hispanic) and conducted member checking. Our reflexive thematic analysis uncovered a troubling truth: schools frequently ignored and misinterpreted trauma, grief, and internalized pain among high school students. Participants described internal battles (i.e., mental health challenges) that often showed up externally as “behaviors” (e.g., fighting, skipping school, substance use) that resulted in exclusionary discipline. Equally important, participants re-imagined schools as homeplaces—sites of care, belonging, and agency. These narratives illuminate the need to dismantle punitive systems, center insights from those at the center of the experiences, and build just, loving, and equitable schools. Full article