This chapter outlines the impetus for the volume, which comes from the shifting youth justice context in England and Wales. It is published at a pivotal juncture as desistance thinking is introduced into policy and practice with children across the spectrum of official sanctions, against a backdrop of scarce academic discussion of this development. The chapter presents the book's aims and guiding questions, which include consideration of whether the concept and theorisation of desistance is helpful when applied to children; how desistance thinking is currently understood and implemented in youth justice policy and practice; and what helps children to move away from offending. Following an overview of the book's rationale and aims, the chapter provides an extensive review of the existing evidence base on children and desistance and highlights the areas of difference and uncertainty compared with adult desistance thinking. The chapter then moves on to describe the policy context within which desistance thinking has become central to youth justice in England and Wales. The chapter concludes by detailing the book's structure and the nature of the various contributions.

In this chapter, the editors draw out and reflect on the central themes that have emerged from the collection. These include conceptualising desistance as a social justice issue, the centrality of caring relationships to children's wellbeing and positive outcomes, the role of identity in children's pathways away from offending and the importance of reflecting on desistance thinking and practice 'through the child's lens'. A key focus here is that children in trouble with the law and the youth justice field should be understood as distinct from and separate to the adult justice system. The chapter ends by considering the policy and practice implications of the collection, as well as exploring avenues for further research that could develop and test the arguments presented in the book.

Youth justice in England and Wales has seen the increasing adoption of desistance thinking in recent years. There has been scarce academic debate of this development, despite the desistance evidence base focussing on adult pathways away from crime. This article examines the theorisation and application of desistance thinking with children, centring on the experiences and narratives of four 'groups' involved in the formal youth justice system in England and Wales, across two empirical studies. It challenges previous scholarship that denies the relevance of desistance theories to under-18s, arguing for progressive desistance practice that prioritises children's healthy long-term development.

The Youth Justice Board for England and Wales was established, by the Crime and Disorder Act 1997, as a non-departmental public body to oversee the operation of the youth justice system. One of the Board’s most significant initiatives was the development, and subsequent national roll-out from April 2000, of a standardised, mandatory, assessment tool, called ASSET, which youth offending teams were obliged to complete for all children subject to court orders or statutory pre-court interventions. ASSET was an actuarial instrument which required practitioners to ascribe scores to individual children across 12 domains of risk. While it also aimed to identify protective factors, the latter were not subject to scoring. Where risks were identified as contributory to the child’s offending behaviour, supervision planning was expected to address those factors. With the onset of, what was known as, the ‘scaled approach’, introduced by the Youth Justice Board in 2009, levels and frequently of interventions were also to be determined by the total ‘risk of reoffending score’ aggregated from the different ASSET domains. The risk factor prevention paradigm, in which ASSET was firmly rooted, was increasingly subject to criticism. At the same time, the growing influence of desistance theory, which focused on the processes through which children give up offending rather than identifying past risks which might help to explain their criminal behaviour, led to a growing recognition that ASSET was unduly deficit focused, limited practitioner discretion and tended to ignore the perspectives of children themselves. The Youth Justice Board accordingly developed a new assessment framework, AssetPlus, which was designed to address some of the criticisms of ASSET. The revised tool was intended to allow risk ‘to be balanced alongside consideration of a young person’s needs, goals and strengths’ and aimed to encourage practitioners to identify

In response to policy concerns in England and Wales and internationally, a considerable knowledge base has identified factors statistically associated with reduced recidivism for children leaving custodial institutions. However, despite resulting guidance on how to support resettlement ('reentry'), practice and outcomes remain disappointing. We argue that this failure reflects weaknesses in the dominant 'risk paradigm', which lacks a theory of change and undermines children's agency. We conceptualise resettlement as a pro-social identity shift. A new practice model reinterprets existing risk-based messages accordingly, and crucially adds principles to guide a child's desistance journey. However, successful implementation may require the model to inform culture change more broadly across youth justice.

The transition from 'child' to 'offender' status can be fast-tracked when offending is formally recognised through formal disposal, with children treated increasing punitively as they progress through the Youth Justice System. The status and 'offenderising' transitions of children who offend is socio-historically contingent, not only on their behaviour, but on political, socio-economic, societal, systemic and demography. We support this perspective through a periodised re-examination of four socio-historical trajectories in the construction of the 'youth offender': Conflict, ambivalence and bifurcation (1908-1979); depenalising diversion and back to justice (1980-1992), fast-tracking the child to offender transition (1993-2007) and tentative depenalisation (2008 to present).

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the treatment of children in penal custody. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a viewpoint piece that analyses the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for children in custody, drawing on published information where available. Findings This paper argues that imprisoned children are an extremely vulnerable group, whose experience of incarceration exacerbates that vulnerability at the best of times. Responses to COVID-19 are particularly painful for children in those settings, and the consequences are manifestly unjust. Originality/value This paper provides an early attempt to consider the impact of COVID-19 on children in prison.

A statistical report published by the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education, in March 2022, provides detailed information on the educational and social care backgrounds of children who received a formal sanction for offending in England. The analysis considers all children who commenced formal primary education between 2002/2003 and 2004/2005 and who received a caution or conviction for an offence when aged between 10 and 17 years inclusive. A cut-off for inclusion was imposed at school Year 13 for each year cohort ‘to ensure that each child had the same amount of time to offend’. The analysis identified a total of about 77,300 such children, equivalent to 5 per cent of school students in that age range over the relevant period. As might be anticipated, children who had been formally sanctioned for offending were much more likely to be male than the wider pupil population, with boys accounting for just over three-quarters (76%) of those receiving a caution or court sentence. Black and mixed heritage children were also overrepresented in the former group by comparison with the overall student population; as indicated in Table 1, Asian children were, by contrast, underrepresented.

In recent years, it has become accepted wisdom that children subject to youth justice intervention, in England and Wales, are more complex than previously, as a consequence of a substantial rise in diversion from the system that filters out children with lower levels of need and less entrenched offending. This ‘complexity’ thesis has been used to explain rises in rates of reoffending. This article demonstrates that the patterns shown in the reoffending data are not those that would be predicted by the complexity thesis. Indeed the data suggest that some groups of children may be less entrenched in offending than hitherto.