Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Positive youth justice

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The 'Positive Youth Justice' model offers an innovative alternative approach to working with children and young people in conflict with the law. Positive Youth Justice (PYJ) is both reactionary and progressive. It is reactionary against contemporary risk-based models of youth justice that stigmatise and exclude children by prioritising the prevention of negative behaviours and outcomes (e.g. offending, reoffending, reconviction, substance use, antisocial behaviour) that allegedly result from exposure to risk factors. This approach portrays children as passive, helpless, risky and dangerous unless adults intervene in their lives using risk-focused responses (Haines and Case 2012). PYJ is progressive through its focus on promoting positive behaviours and outcomes for children (e.g. access to their universal rights, access to and engagement with support services, opportunities and guidance, educational attainment, employment and training). PYJ seeks to normalise offending behaviour by children and to respond through promotional, child-friendly, diversionary and inclusionary interventions (see Case and Haines 2015a,b).

The successful application of the PYJ model in England and Wales has been illustrated by the 'Children First, Offenders Second' approach (Haines and Case 2015), a form of PYJ advocating the systemic use of child-friendly and child-appropriate responses grounded in positive prevention, diversion, evidence-based partnership working, children's participation and engagement, legitimacy and responsibilising adults to ensure positive outcomes for children.

In the United States, a form of Positive Youth Justice is supported by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The U.S. model is an effort to blend the science of adolescent development with the practice principles of positive youth development to design interventions for justice-involved youth. The PYJ model encourages youth justice systems to focus on protective factors as well as risk factors, strengths as well as problems, positive outcomes as well as negative outcomes, and generally to focus on facilitating successful transitions to adulthood for young people. As promulated in the U.S., the PYJ model is designed to facilitate youths' acquisition of two key assets (learning/doing and attaching/belonging) in six separate life domains (work, education, relationships, community, health, and creativity).

References

Haines, K.R. and Case, S.P. (2015) Positive Youth Justice: Children First, Offenders Second. Bristol: Policy Press.

Butts, J.A., Bazemore, G. and Meroe, A.S. (2010). Positive Youth Justice: Framing Justice Interventions Using the Concepts of Positive Youth Development. Washington, DC: Coalition for Juvenile Justice.

Butts, J.A., Mayer, S. and Ruth, G. (2005). Focusing Juvenile Justice on Positive Youth Development. Chicago, IL: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago.

Case, S.P. and Haines, K.R. (2015a) Children First, Offenders Second: The centrality of engagement in positive youth justice. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 54 (2): 157-175.

Case, S.P. and Haines, K. R. (2015b) Children First, Offenders Second Positive Promotion: Reframing the Prevention Debate. Youth Justice Journal, Early view.

Haines, K.R. and Case, S.P. (2012) Is the Scaled Approach a Failed Approach? Youth Justice, 12 (3): 212-228.

References

Positive youth justice Wikipedia