Challenging the Reductionism of “Evidence-Based” Youth Justice

Abstract

The generation of empirical evidence to explain offending by children and young people has been a central driver of criminological and sociological research for more than two centuries. Across the international field of youth justice, empirical research evidence has become an integral means of complementing and extending the knowledge and understanding of offending offered by the official enquiries and data collection of professional stakeholders and an essential tool for informing ‘evidence-based’ policy, practice and ‘effective intervention’. However, it will be argued that the hegemonic empirical evidence-base created by youth justice research over the past two decades has been generated through methodological reductionism - the oversimplification of complexity, the restriction of conceptual lens and the relative exclusion of competing explanatory paradigms and empirical methodologies, which in turn, has reduced the scope and validity of the policy and practice recommendations derived from it.

In bed with the state

“…Resistance in this way was described as "an awareness of the operation and scope of this epistemology, its history, and its ongoing impact; a refusal to participate in propagating it; and support/create space for other knowledge systems" (p. 68). One site of resistance has been the scholarly problematization of the risk management approach (Case, 2021;Pereira & Ngo, 2023;Pollack, 2010;Pollack, 2012;Turner, 2022). The risk management approach based on Andrews & Bonta's (2010) work and has been considered the "gold standard" of evidence-based practice in forensic mental health (Gannon & Ward, 2014;Prujean et al, 2022).…”

Searching for context: a review of “what works” reviews of interventions to prevent youth offending using the EMMIE Framework

“…Therefore, the reductionist, decontextualising limitations of the established “What Works” evaluation framework in youth justice and the responsibilising and adulterising excesses of the risk-based interventions that it privileges (Case, 2021) strongly indicate that research and practice should explore alternative methodologies for conceptualising and evaluating the “effectiveness” of preventative interventions. Additionally, the rapidly emerging context of “Child First” justice is based on the tenets [2] of seeing children as children, promoting prosocial identity for positive outcomes, collaboration with children and diversion from the formal YJS (YJB, 2021), is supplanting established (reductionist, decontextualised) understandings of and responses to children who offend.…”

On masculinities: navigating the tension between individual and structural considerations

“…The impact the ACEs and risk factor framework has had on the support sector, including youth offending, has been vast in recent years (Almuneef et al, 2017;McGavock and Spratt, 2017;Lacey and Minnis, 2020). However, there are increasing calls for an ACE framework to be used in a more nuanced way, highlighting the potential for the ACE checklist to be used in a reductionist and over-simplistic way to denote determinism and stigma (Lacey and Minnis, 2020;Case, 2021). Ultimately, organising people into categories of victimisation and perpetration without an understanding of the complex overlaps is limiting.…”