Youth Justice

The risk factors prevention paradigm (RFPP) is currently the dominant discourse in juvenile justice, exerting a powerful influence over policy and practice in the UK, Ireland and other countries. This article argues that the predominance of the RFPP is in many ways an obstacle to a fuller understanding of, and more effective response to, youth crime. Part of the problem is the often over-simplified assumptions and exaggerated claims of the RFPP literature, which translates the findings of risk-focused research for policy makers and for popular consumption, but largely ignores the caveats of the scientific researchers themselves. Moreover, the RFPP has intrinsic, but generally neglected, methodological and theoretical shortcomings, which mean that it fails to account properly for key facets of youth justice, such as personal agency, socio-cultural context, psychological motivation and the human rights dimension.

The Quest for Identity study explores how young people maintain their resistance to offending and it argues that for some this entails active resistance, rather than merely reflecting an innocence often associated with childhood non-offending. Two qualitative methods were used in the study to elicit young people's own perspectives. Secondary analysis was conducted on 112 semi-structured interviews with teenagers, 62 of whom who had never offended (`resisters') and 50 of whom had offended and then ceased (`desisters'). Additionally, primary data were gathered by means of peer led focus groups conducted with 52 resisters. A key contribution of the study is the development of typologies of young resisters and desisters. The article outlines the two resister types, namely innocents and streetwise resisters and the three desister types: reformed characters , desisters on the margins , and quasi-resisters (desisters who retain a resister identity) which were developed during the analysis. It also considers the implications of the findings for policy, practice and research.

Several Western European juvenile justice systems have become more punitive in the last few decades. This article explores whether the Belgian juvenile justice system, traditionally one of the most welfare oriented in Europe, has taken a punitive turn as well. An analysis of the recent amendment of the most punitive element in the Belgian juvenile justice system, transfer to Adult Court, does not provide a definite answer. The regulations on transfer were not made harsher by the new Youth Act. However, we will argue that the amendment, although `mild' at first sight, may, in practice, result in a punitive shift.

This article addresses questions arising from debates surrounding issues of surveillance and privacy in the light of rapid developments in new technologies, specifically electronic databases for information sharing between professionals and agencies. We examine claims that the conjuncture of technology and genetics, producing identification technologies that `read' the body, have heralded the emergence of a `biopolitics of control', paying particular attention to the ways in which children and young people in the UK have become a focus of new control technologies. We argue that current developments, in neglecting the embodied nature of subjectivity, confuse identification with processes of identity formation, thereby contributing to conditions that nurture the problems of social disorder such technology is meant to reduce. This argument raises a set of questions for the law and processes of youth justice that we explore through a discussion of the inclusion of children and young people in the UK DNA data base.