Abstract
Wayne Taylor, Rod Earle and Richard Hester (eds), Youth Justice Handbook: Theory, Policy and Practice, Willan Publishing/The Open University: Cullompton, 2009; 256 pp. (exc. index): 1843927160, 9781843927167, £22.99 (pbk), £58.00 (hbk)
The Youth Justice Handbook is a comprehensive, thought-provoking volume. Written in a way that will be accessible and indeed enjoyable for the target audience of practitioners and students alike, this book encourages us all to question our assumptions about youth justice. Twenty-three succinct chapters provide the reader with an insight into contemporary issues in youth justice practice, while constantly encouraging the interrogation of new ideas and perspectives.
This book centres on an ethical and moral approach to youth justice practice, reminding us to think of the subject as first and foremost a child, and only secondarily as an offender… if at all. Indeed the book talks about a shift in attitude towards juvenile deviancy, from being a normal part of the transition to adulthood in the 1980s, to being a punishable offence following the murder of Jamie Bulger and New Labour’s retributive rhetoric in the 1990s. Are we helping children by criminalizing them and making them the subject of interventions that focus only on their negative behaviour and not their positive attributes? Are we not stigmatizing them and encouraging them to live up to the criminal label we have assigned to them? These are some of the central questions of this book.
Only a couple of chapters are written by practitioners themselves, but there is a wealth of empirical evidence offered by the academic authors which leads to a constant emphasis on the interplay between knowledge and practice. This is not just an intellectual exploration of issues; there is a real focus on how academic concepts translate into the everyday practices of those working with children caught up in the youth justice system.
Contributors in Part I, especially Joe Yates and Nancy O’Dell, remind us that we cannot understand young people’s experiences of crime apart from the contexts in which they live. They argue that a focus on the individual has distracted us from structural factors that have a significant influence on the life chances of our young people. This section also considers the social construction of concepts, interrogating some of the ideas behind them. For example, the chapter by Carrie-Anne Myers on bullying, a form of interpersonal violence that can be very damaging but that is largely seen as a part of growing up, demonstrates the danger of some of these normative assumptions. The need to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions is a key message that is echoed throughout the remainder of the book.
In Part II, the role of knowledge and evidence in youth justice practice is under the spotlight. Jo Phoenix explains how political interests and a concern to save money have driven youth justice responses in the past, with little concern for evidence to show the effectiveness of different initiatives. Stephen Case provides an illuminating critique of the ASSET form used by Youth Offending Team practitioners to assess risk factors for offending on the basis of the neglect of wider structural issues, a point raised earlier in the volume. Wendy Stainton Rogers concludes by providing an insight into how different epistemological and ontological perspectives can shape our thinking about crime. Taken together, the contributors in this part call for a thorough review of the evidence upon which youth justice responses are based.
Part III is more concerned with policy, with a great opening chapter by Amanda Holt on parenting orders. Holt critiques these orders for criminalizing the child and the parents, and again, for neglecting wider structural inequalities. She makes the point that while these orders serve a ‘politically populist function’ (p. 19) they do nothing to tackle the deeper problems of multiple disadvantage.
In Part IV the focus is on encouraging reflective practice, while at the same time acknowledging the constraints practitioners face in adhering to institutionalized ways of working. The chapters in this section aim to encourage frontline workers to think more creatively about their own ways of working and to question how their own assumptions might blind them. Jean Hine captures the point perfectly when she suggests that false assumptions can result in counterproductive attempts to ‘hammer the square pegs of young people’s lives in to conceptually round holes’ (p. 170).
Finally, Part V looks at the global level, with discussions about international conventions on the rights of the child, the varying ages of criminal responsibility and comparative international youth justice practices. Comparisons with other jurisdictions enable us to situate our national responses.
Overall this book is invaluable in terms of introducing the key issues around youth justice practice and encouraging critical reflection. While dealing with wider debates, including structure versus agency and welfare versus justice, this book also captures everyday experiences at ground level. It calls for society to play a role in the socialization of a child born into adversity so that we might deal with the root causes of offending as opposed to punishing the resulting behaviour. However, it is important for the reader to keep in mind that this volume was written in the last days of New Labour and the current government has arguably heeded very few, if any, of these ideas; a move no doubt disappointing for the contributors.