Youth Justice

This article offers counterstories from a Caribbean youth detention centre in support of an agenda to decolonise youth justice and rethink childhood. It contrasts the youth’s own ‘ethics of illegality’ centred on structural violence and inequality with institutional interventions revolving around individual remedies and risk factors as well as culturally specific but peculiarly Western conceptions of parenthood and childhood. Concerned about the exclusive ways of regulating and defining parenthood, childhood and safety that stem from a globalisation of youth crime control, the article calls for a vernacularisation that takes seriously the complexity and context-dependency of young people’s lives.

The Child First Participation agenda in England marks a paradigm shift in youth justice. This solidifies a commitment to democratising decision-making processes with children. Drawing on interviews with children and professionals, this article explores the enablers and constraints to Child First participation in youth justice services, including how risk-oriented practices, managerialism and neo-liberal mechanisms constrain positive relationships with children. In this article, Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ is used to explore systemic problems when engaging children in co-producing youth justice interventions. The article suggests how participatory practices can provide freedom from symbolic violence for both children and practitioners.

In 2018, the National Protocol on Reducing Unnecessary Criminalisation of Looked-after Children and Care Leavers was published in England. The protocol represented national recognition of the issue and called for local authorities to implement their own agreements. However, the protocol was given no statutory status, which immediately raised questions about its potential impact. Drawing on analysis of 36 local protocols from across England and Wales, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of using local agreements to divert children in care and care leavers away from formal justice systems contact.

Although research has been conducted on the risks and effects of juvenile sexual assault, there is a gap in our knowledge surrounding juvenile sexual assault and how the law discusses victims. The goal of this endeavor is to provide a systematic summary of juvenile sexual assault statutes in the United States of America. In pursuit of this objective, a content analysis of the sexual assault and consent state laws of the United States of America was performed. Four themes emerged, including laws that sought to (1) conceptualize juvenile sexual assault victimization, (2) offer evidentiary standards in juvenile sexual assault cases, (3) assess the seriousness and punishment of juvenile sexual assault, and (4) provide services for juveniles who have been sexually victimized. Within these themes, legislation was inconsistent from one state to another. From these findings, however, we encourage legislative bodies to offer greater specificity in their laws, re-assess the seriousness of this phenomenon, and express greater support for victims of child sexual assault.

This systematic literature review synthesizes available empirical studies exploring the challenges experienced by transgender youth within juvenile justice contexts and systems responses to them. The review followed PRISMA guidelines and searches were conducted in five academic databases from January 2000 to December 2020. Four qualitative articles met the inclusion criteria for review. Further research must be pursued to elucidate the lived experiences of transgender youth in juvenile justice systems. The juvenile justice system responses in providing for the unique health, social, and psychological needs of this vulnerable, carceral population are necessary to influence and guide best practice policies and procedures.

This article analyses the qualitative findings of doctoral research on a sample of 210 young offenders who were transferred to Adult Court in 1999, 2000 and 2001. The results give an insight into the impact of juvenile transfer on a specific subgroup of participants, now aged between 30 and 40 years, allowing a critical evaluation of their pathways into adulthood. Drawing on the life stories of 17 young adults from a cohort of transferred juveniles who were still in prison at the time, we focus on their lived experiences of the decision to transfer them from the juvenile justice system and its impact on their lives. The findings support the idea that transfer, and its experienced ‘collateral’ effects, contributes to an escalating trajectory of judicial contacts; a view echoed by the transferred participants themselves. We present and discuss three main findings that offer important insights to extend the understandings of patterns of reoffending and involvement in the criminal justice system: (1) the impact of the first detention in an adult prison (as a consequence of the juvenile transfer), (2) a fatalistic attitude towards the future and (3) the unanticipated impact of family on views on re-offending.

Since the early 2000s, Turkey’s youth justice system has undergone extensive reforms. However, it is centred around high-security remand imprisonment. Based on the research conducted between 2014 and 2015 to comprehend how high-security remand imprisonment has acquired such a central role, this article provides an analysis on the ways in which the system has diverted into a peculiar ‘managerialism’. Certain themes emerged revealing the turn to ‘managerialism’: (1) lack of coordination between different professional units and lack of evidence-based policymaking, (2) prioritization of speed and technology, (3) peripheral role of social work officials and (4) the importance of prisons.