‘It’s a Hard Balance to Find’: The Perspectives of Youth Justice Practitioners in England on the Place of ‘Risk’ in an Emerging ‘Child-First’ World
| Author | Anne-Marie Day |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14732254221075205 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14732254221075205
Youth Justice
2023, Vol. 23(1) 58 –75
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14732254221075205
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‘It’s a Hard Balance to Find’: The
Perspectives of Youth Justice
Practitioners in England on the Place
of ‘Risk’ in an Emerging ‘Child-First’
World
Anne-Marie Day
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a shift in youth justice central policy narratives in England and Wales
away from risk assessment and management and towards child first. However, this shift is meeting with
a number of challenges on the ground. The reasons for this have been conceptualised as resistance and
reticence, contradiction and bifurcation and confusion about competing narratives emerging from different
UK government departments about how to meet the statutory requirement to ‘prevent’ youth offending.
The article emphasises the importance of meaningfully engaging with youth justice practitioners in debates
about how to meet this challenge.
Keywords
child first, child-first offender second, desistance, risk, risk factor prevention paradigm, youth justice, youth
justice policy, youth offending
Introduction
The Youth Justice Board (the non-departmental public body with responsibility for over-
seeing the Youth Justice System in England and Wales) recently published an updated
Strategic Plan for 2021–2024 (YJB, 2021: 10) which identified child first as their central
guiding principle. Notably, this marks a shift from the approach outlined in their strategic
plan of 2019–2022 of ‘child first, offender second’ (YJB, 2019: 7), presumably in response
to criticisms that the ‘offender second’ element continued to have a labelling effect and
deficit focus (Bateman, 2020). This represents a significant policy shift for the Youth
Justice Board (YJB) away from the risk factor prevention paradigm (RFPP) (Bateman,
2020; Case and Haines, 2016; Wigzell, 2021). It has been a journey of several years, which
Corresponding author:
Anne-Marie Day, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: a.day@keele.ac.uk
1075205YJJ0010.1177/14732254221075205Youth JusticeDay
research-article2022
Original Article
Day 59
gained significant momentum following UK Government commissioned Taylor Review of
the Youth Justice System (Taylor, 2016), and subsequent appointment of Charlie Taylor as
Chair of the YJB in 2017. However, despite this shift, there remains within national legisla-
tion in England and Wales the principle aim of youth offending teams to ‘prevent’ offend-
ing (s37 (1) The Crime and Disorder Act 1998). Risk assessment and management have
become the means by which the statutory responsibility to prevent offending has been
executed. As a result of this and other key pieces of legislation, a ‘risk culture’ (Case and
Haines, 2016; Hampson, 2018) has dominated both youth justice and wider criminal jus-
tice practice for the past quarter of a century. However, as moves away from risk and
towards child-first approaches emerge from central policy narratives, it is important that
we gain an understanding of the perspectives of the youth justice practitioners responsible
for navigating this shift, and the impact this is having on front-line practice.
This article is based on findings from an evaluation of the YJB’s Constructive
Resettlement Pathfinder Project. Data are drawn from 14 interviews with youth justice
practitioners and operational managers, which were conducted as part of the evaluation.
This article will argue that the policy shift away from risk narratives is meeting with a
number of challenges on the ground. Previous research has argued that despite attempts
by the YJB to move towards desistance-based and child-first approaches, the risk culture
continues to dominate front-line practice (Hampson, 2018). This article builds on this nar-
rative by offering further insight into the potential barriers to the cultural shift on the
ground, and emphasises the importance of engaging with and hearing the perceptions of
front-line staff about the current and future direction of youth justice policy and practice.
Setting the scene
It is important to first set out what is meant by child first, the risk factor prevention para-
digm and desistance within a youth justice context. The risk factor prevention paradigm
has been the dominant discourse across criminal justice since the 1990s and emerged in
tandem with a general rise in actuarialism across public services (Smith, 2006). The actu-
arialist perspective seeks to identify causes within the context of risk factors, without
seeking to explain why the link is there or a theory of change. It also focuses firmly on
preventing and controlling the crime ‘problem’ through risk assessment and management.
Various studies such as ‘The Cambridge Study’ (West and Farrington, 1973) and ‘The
Rochester Youth Development Study’ (Loeber et al., 1996) claimed to be able to identify
a series of risk factors that increase the probability of a person or child committing a
criminal offence. Therefore, by identifying and addressing these key risk factors, it was
concluded that a person’s risk of reoffending could reduce if they received the correct
‘intervention’ to address this (Farrington, 2002).
The risk paradigm has been heavily criticised in recent years for its flawed methodol-
ogy (Case and Haines, 2009), its labelling effect (Bateman, 2020), and the adulterisation
and responsibilisation of children (Haines and Case, 2015):
Privileging a risk-based youth justice agenda allowed the government to demonise children in
conflict with the law and youth justice system, using net-widening, punitive, labelling,
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