The Children's Fund and the prevention of crime and anti-social behaviour
| Author | David Prior,Paul Mason |
| Published date | 01 August 2008 |
| Date | 01 August 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895808092430 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
279
The Children’s Fund and the prevention of
crime and anti-social behaviour
PAUL MASON AND DAVID PRIOR
University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
Early intervention prevention programmes form a significant
element in the UK’s complex and sometimes contradictory youth
justice system. This article focuses on one such national programme
in England, the Children’s Fund, which has combined a broad aim
of tackling children’s social exclusion with a specific objective of
reducing youth crime and anti-social behaviour, influenced by the
Youth Justice Board’s risk factors paradigm. In order to understand
how these aims have been pursued in practice, the article discusses
findings from a ‘Theory of Change’ evaluation of a range of
preventative initiatives developed through a single Children’s Fund
programme located in a large English city. The article discusses the
implications of this kind of programme for the development of
socially inclusive interventions with children and young people
thought to be ‘at risk’ of involvement in crime and anti-social
behaviour, but also draws attention to uncertainties and tensions in
the relationship between risk-based crime prevention interventions
and initiatives addressing broader aspects of young people’s social
exclusion. The advantages of the Theory of Change approach to the
evaluation of complex initiatives are also briefly considered.
Key Words
children • evaluation • prevention • risk • social exclusion
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 8(3): 279–296
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808092430
Introduction
The re-invention of ‘youth justice’ in the UK, in the late 1990s, had as its core
objective the prevention of youth-offending (Newburn, 2002; R. Smith,
2006). The idea of prevention, in this context and in the eyes of many crim-
inologists, has acquired specific connotations, signalling a political and popu-
list preference for coercive, stigmatizing, moralizing and punitive interventions
to control the behaviours of young people (Pitts, 2001; Muncie, 2002;
R. Smith, 2003). Children and young people are viewed primarily as poten-
tial threats to public safety and social order, and the criminal justice system,
appropriately expanded and strengthened, is given the task of preventing the
risks they pose from being realized. Risks that children and young people
themselves might encounter—neglect of their welfare needs, poor conditions
for their personal and social development—and action concerned with the
‘prevention’ of damaging outcomes arising from these risks, become a sec-
ondary concern (R. Smith, 2006: 97–8). Youth justice, however, is a complex
and unsettled field of competing discourses and practices (Muncie and
Hughes, 2002; D. Smith, 2005). While there may be strong grounds for the
claim that England and Wales is ‘the site of the most punitive youth justice
system in Europe’ (Goldson and Muncie, 2006: ix), there is also emerging
evidence of the persistence of social or ‘welfare’ modes of response to young
people ‘in trouble’ (Burnett and Appleton, 2004; Field, 2007; Hughes et al.,
2007) and of interest in approaches to prevention that seek to protect both
public order and the well-being of children and young people (D. Smith,
2005; Case, 2006). Moreover, the ‘risk management’ orientation of official
youth justice policy itself includes forms of intervention that (at least in prin-
ciple) address aspects of the personal and social needs of young people and
their families (D. Smith, 2005; R. Smith, 2006; Case, 2007).
In this article, we examine one specific approach to the prevention of child-
ren and young people’s involvement in crime and anti-social behaviour, via a
case study of the activities of a Children’s Fund programme in a large English
city. The Children’s Fund can be viewed as an emblematic policy initiative of
the British Labour government elected in 1997. It exemplifies a number of
core ‘New Labour’ concerns: the identification of social exclusion as perhaps
the overriding problem facing British society (Levitas, 2005); the recognition
that improvement in the circumstances and prospects of children and young
people must be a key priority for government action (Williamson, 2005); and
a determination to respond to perceived issues of crime and disorder through-
out society, but especially those associated with the behaviours of young people
(R. Smith, 2003). Analysis of the Children’s Fund approach to addressing the
social exclusion of children and young people can be found in Barnes and
Morris (2008). Our aims in this article are to describe and assess how and
why specific Children’s Fund ‘crime prevention’ initiatives in this one case
study area came to be developed, and how they impacted on the lives of child-
ren and their families; to explore the relationships between specific objectives
of crime reduction and objectives concerned with aspects of social inclusion
Criminology & Criminal Justice 8(3)280
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