Youth Justice

This article attempts to broker a compromise between critical criminological challenges to the populist (punitivist) and negative conceptions of young people ‘at risk’ of offending -which are used to justify (potentially deleterious) risk-based interventions (Goldson, 2005) -and the positivist risk-based models upon which these interventions are predicated. It is argued that all young people are, by definition, ‘at risk’ of problem outcomes due to their relative powerlessness in society; exemplified by the adult presumption/prescription of salient risks and the subsequent imposition of responses underpinned by these factors. However, the article concludes that, far from being rejected, the risk factor approach should be retained and utilized through a re-orientation towards risks identified through qualitative research with young people and a simultaneous emphasis upon factors which enable young people to thrive and develop. The pursuit of ‘causes’ and ‘predictors’ of youth offending is eschewed in favour of a re-conception of salient factors as ‘correlates’ and ‘indicators’ of potential behaviours -both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which can then be utilized to supplement further qualitative research and, crucially, the explicit involvement of young people through consultation and participation processes shaping their futures.

This article explores some of the methodological, ethical and practical difficulties of researching with young black people and is based on a three-year long research project that was a collaboration between The Children’s Society (a major NGO in England) and the University of Central England in Birmingham. The article uses findings from this research project to examine some broader epistemological issues related to ethnography, research more generally, and young black people’s dealings with the youth and criminal justice systems.

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted into youth and crime over a 20-month period. It explores the meanings that young people, residing in a marginalized community, attached to what Evans et al. (1996) have described as the ‘neighbourhood dogma’ of ‘not grassing’. By unpacking and analysing the meaning of the term ‘grassing’ and by listening to the voices of young people the article examines a range of factors which underpin the ‘no grassing’ rule.