A Question of Age? Applying Desistance With Children
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14732254231223704 |
| Author | Alexandra Wigzell,Tim Bateman |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14732254231223704
Youth Justice
2024, Vol. 24(3) 353 –371
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/14732254231223704
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A Question of Age? Applying
Desistance With Children
Alexandra Wigzell and Tim Bateman
Abstract
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.
Keywords
child development, child first, children, desistance, identity shift, youth justice
. . . we disavow the term and the concept of desistance when applied to children. One can only
desist after having developed an adult identity (in this instance, as a so-called ‘offender’) and
having evidenced a long-term trajectory of offending behaviour. Children are still growing,
physically, mentally, emotionally for the first time so they cannot desist, they can only ‘become’
(Case and Haines, 2020: 12).
Introduction
Buried in the footnotes of a recent Youth Justice article was this thought-provoking state-
ment on the applicability of desistance thinking to children, by Stephen Case and Kevin
Haines. It is implicitly a critique of the increasing adoption of desistance thinking in youth
justice policy in England and Wales over the past 7 years.
There has been scarce academic discussion of this move, despite the desistance knowl-
edge base being based largely on research with adults.1 Although there is a limited, albeit
developing international knowledge base about the desistance pathways of children, these
Corresponding author:
Alexandra Wigzell, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK.
Email: akc36@cam.ac.uk
1223704YJJ0010.1177/14732254231223704Youth JusticeWigzell and Bateman
research-article2024
Original Article
354 Youth Justice 24(3)
studies have typically focussed only on children understood as ‘serious’ or ‘persistent’
offenders (Halsey and Deegan, 2015; Johns et al., 2017; McMahon and Jump, 2018).
Understandably perhaps, some scholars have questioned the theoretical and policy rele-
vance of studying desistance among low-rate adolescent ‘offenders’, since such activity is
normative (Laub and Sampson, 2001). However, with desistance thinking increasingly
applied across the spectrum of youth justice sanctions in England and Wales, it has become
necessary to question and understand the relevance of desistance thinking with a much
broader group of children.
This article accordingly seeks to examine three interrelated questions: first, given that
most desistance research is focussed on adults, what is the relevance of the concept to
under-18s?; second, does desistance presuppose an offender identity?; and, third, if so,
what does this mean for children?
In what follows, we begin with a brief overview of recent policy developments regard-
ing the implementation of desistance thinking in youth justice in England and Wales. We
then briefly discuss the criminological literature on maturation and age, as well as iden-
tity. Next, we outline the methodologies of the two studies on which our arguments are
based. From here, we turn to the substantive findings of the article, which are split into
four sections, each exploring the experiences of a different group of youth justice-involved
children: the ‘conformists’, ‘uncertains’, ‘shifters’ and ‘survivors’. The article concludes
that, contrary to Case and Haines’ ‘disavowal’ of the concept of desistance for children,
desistance thinking has much to offer youth justice. However, our findings suggest that
the application of desistance to children is context-dependent, meaning quite different
things for different children. While our focus is England and Wales – in reflection of the
location of the two research studies around which the article is organised, and the policy
context with which we are most familiar – desistance terminology is employed in many
other youth justice jurisdictions and thus the findings are likely to have international rel-
evance (for a discussion of desistance and youth justice in other contexts, see, e.g. Bugnon,
2015; Droppelmann, 2017; Haigh, 2009; McAra and McVie, 2022; Mulvey and Schubert,
2016; Panuccio et al., 2012).
Desistance and Children – in Policy and Research
In policy
Over the past 7 years or so, desistance language and research has been manifest in youth
justice policy in England and Wales. The Youth Justice Board’s (YJB) introduction of the
revised youth justice assessment tool, AssetPlus, from 2015, was ostensibly intended to
mark the departure from risk to desistance thinking. While its predecessor, Asset, was
grounded in the risk paradigm, AssetPlus draws explicitly on desistance research by plac-
ing ‘more emphasis on strengths and on factors which support/hinder desistance from
offending’ (Baker, 2014: 6). At the same time, it should be acknowledged that the new
framework did not purport to eschew risk, which it was argued ‘should not be the only
focus of work with young people but neither can it be completely ignored’ (Baker, 2014:
5). Moreover, reservations remain about the extent to which AssetPlus has led to practice
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