"Youth Justice Practice is Just Messy" Youth Offending Team Practitioners: Culture and Identity
| Author | Dr Rachel Morris |
Introduction
The delivery of youth justice services has an important and long standing relationship with practitioners' understanding of the philosophy underlying the aims of youth justice work. Youth justice is an ever changing and evolving field of policy and practice. With its close and somewhat unfortunate connections to political and media discourse, the philosophy underpinning youth justice in England is never set. This means that with every reconfiguration of the Youth Justice System (YJS), practitioners' are expected to adapt and reconfigure with it. The most recent legislative changes to the YJS (Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008; Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012) alongside the current period of economic recession have meant another reconfiguration has been necessary. Currently policies in the YJS are underpinned by a risk-based managerialism (Muncie et al., 2002; Pitts, 2003; O'Mahony, 2009; Bateman, 2011; Case & Haines, 2015) yet on a local and individual level such practice does not necessarily follow suit. This is due to the different interpretations local authorities make on policies from the Youth Justice Board (YJB) leading to what many have termed as a 'postcode lottery' (Ramsbotham, as cited in Hill, 2012) of youth justice services. The nature of youth justice is like a 'pick and mix' (Muncie, 2000:31) despite National Standards (YJB, 2013) being in place; whereby instead of providing a set framework for all work with young people in the system, the shifting philosophical and ideological foundations results in a constant status of central ambiguity (Souhami, 2007; 2014).
For practitioners, this 'central ambiguity' results in diverse and conflicting approaches to the delivery of youth justice services. This is further complicated by the multi-agency approach (as placed into statute by section 39.5, Crime and Disorder Act 1998) of YOTs; as there are practitioners from organisations whose ethoses do not naturally blend well together, for example, the police (public protection/justice oriented) versus social services (welfare oriented). The inherent nature of youth justice services is subsequently one of contradiction or as Sarah, a YOT Social Worker described, 'youth justice practice is just messy.' To practice in a YOT is to negotiate a consistent state of ambiguity; practitioners have to balance their own beliefs, with that of the team and then situate that in the wider ethos of the YJS. As Souhami (2007:193) states, 'practitioners' fluctuating and contradictory understanding of what it was to be an occupational member was brought into focus by the 'ambiguous organisational position' that they were required to adopt'. It is therefore important to consider the organisational culture and occupational identity of YOTs and YOT practitioners due to the influence it has on processes such as the writing of assessments and designing of intervention plans, both key elements of YOT practice. Yet such concepts have received little exploration in comparison with some of the other key agencies of criminal justice. There is a vast body of research literature on the organisational culture and occupational identity of police officers (Skolnick, 2008; Reiner, 2010) and over recent years more research has emerged exploring prison officer culture and identity (Crawley, 2004; Liebling et al., 2011) yet agencies such as probation (this has recently started to change, see Mawby & Worrall, 2011) and YOTs have received much less attention. Anna Souhami's (2007) seminal work exploring the occupational culture and identity of YOT practitioners has been the most detailed published account to date which focused on exploring the transition of a former social services youth justice team into a multi-agency YOT in 1999/2000. Moreover, Burnett and Appleton (2004) as well as Ellis and Boden (2004) have also explored YOT professional culture yet both concluded that more research was needed in this area to explore key issues such as multi-agency working and the values underpinning team practice. This paper seeks to explore the organisational culture and occupational identity of YOTs and YOT practitioners. It will discuss what does it mean to be a member of a YOT and how do practitioners understand their work, values and identity? It will also consider how explorations of culture and identity can inform an understanding of the relationship between policy and practice.
Research Methods
The findings in this article are drawn from fourteen months of fieldwork undertaken during 2012-13 for doctoral research which explored how the concept of 'risk' has impacted on YOT practice. The research was an ethnographic, 'step-in, step-out' (Madden, 2010) study which involved five YOTs in the North of England. The study comprised of over 300 hours of participant observation, 30 in-depth interviews with practitioners, documentary analysis of 25 young people's case files and YOT policy and procedural documents and 8 case studies. The 'step-in, step out' approach is what Madden (2010:80) describes as being the short-term and/or not co-resident approach to ethnography. When researching organisations where the time spent in the 'field' of study is limited to 'working hours' (usually 9am to 5pm) the 'step-in, step-out' approach is particularly suitable. Researching organisations can be particularly difficult to undertake given the multiple levels of access that have to be negotiated. Following Buchanan et al.'s (1988:53) advice an opportunistic approach to the fieldwork was adopted; this means that any chances that were offered to collect data were undertaken, in the spirit of being opportunistic. The way that data was collected unfolded as more and more time in 'the field' was spent because as Pearson (1993:x) states, 'there can be few if any hard-and-fast rules for the successful conduct of ethnographic research'. The majority of the 14 months in the field was spent undertaking participant observation in a variety of settings including youth courts and YOT offices, attending team meetings, talking to practitioners and reading documents including YOT policies and procedures as well as young people's case files. By triangulating these methods, a picture of YOT practice was able to be built up.
YOT Practitioner Occupational Identity
The culture of an organisation can be described as the values shared by...
To continue reading
Request your trial