Hearing new voices: Re-viewing Youth Justice Policy through Practitioners’ Relationships with Young People

Abstract

The relationship between young people and practitioners is the centre-piece of youth justice provision, yet little research-based knowledge has accumulated on its minutiae. After reviewing reforms affecting professional discretion, the paper draws on the concepts of dyadic relationships and praxis to reinvigorate a research agenda aimed at delineating a more nuanced understanding of practice relationships. Drawing on practice wisdom from across related social work fields, we argue that centralizing the practitioner-young person relationship remains the key to successful practice and thus needs greater, more detailed research attention. These claims are supported with a number of pilot interviews with youth justice workers about successful interventions that complement and extend related studies. The paper concludes with suggestions for research to enable joint activity between young people and practitioners to 'rethink' youth justice.

Janus‐Faced Youth Justice Work and the Transformation of Accountability

“…This supports the recent speculation by Drake, Fergusson and Briggs () that:

Far from advancing in lock step, increased localisation is in principle capable of reducing practitioner discretion. It has the potential to generate small‐scale centralism, whereby newly empowered local managers replace the paraphernalia of centralist controls with their own closely monitored strictures.

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“…The introduction of multi‐agency YOTs by the CDA 1998 encouraged a number of empirical studies at the organisational level (for example, Burnett and Appleton ; Souhami ; Field ), but as Phoenix () discusses, recently dominant approaches within youth criminology have tended to flatten ‘the complexity (and the specificity) of the social relations that make up the youth penal realm’ (p.136). Recent dramatic reductions in the numbers of young people receiving a reprimand, final warning or conviction for the first time (‘first time entrants’), numbers of young people sentenced in court and numbers of young people in custody, and a political context in which aspects of the current approach to youth justice work are being questioned (Carlile ; Taylor ) have again prompted new interest in the local functioning of youth justice organisations (for example, Drake, Fergusson and Briggs ; Smith ; Byrne and Brooks ; Morris ). In what follows, we demonstrate how decoupling the issues of: (i) ‘standardisation’ and ‘centralisation’; and (ii) ‘managerial’ and ‘practitioner’ discretion, enables analysis of how changing relationships between the central and local bureaucracy in youth justice have impacted on power relations and perceptions of accountability within local organisations.…”

“…We came to understand contemporary youth justice work at the front line as ‘janus‐faced’, involving ‘looking up’ to managers, but also ‘looking across’ to the children and families who made up a case manager's or worker's caseload. These empirical observations are not new: the difficulties associated with balancing ‘relational’ and ‘instrumental’ aspects of professional practice have been explored in relation to youth justice (for example, Prior and Mason ; Drake, Fergusson and Briggs ; Morris ) and social and probation work carried out in non‐youth justice settings (for example, Broadhurst et al . ; Mawby and Worrall ).…”

“…On the other hand, frontline practitioners worked directly with young people and families (‘face‐to‐face’ work or, for some, ‘the real work’). This aspect of the job involved building relationships in ways that were largely uncaptured by performance management systems which recorded ‘contacts’, tasks undertaken and decisions made, but not the interactional techniques used to secure the ‘negotiated connection’ that enabled the completion of the work or the qualities of the associated relationships (Drake, Fergusson and Briggs , p.31; see also Prior and Mason ). As a consequence, the experience of ‘face‐to‐face work’ was judged to be relatively unaffected by change, despite new ‘paperwork’ – and in some cases, differing caseloads – particularly in areas of work unregulated by National Standards and where assessment documents were not centrally determined (Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board ).…”

Conceptualising ‘The Relationship’ in Intensive Key Worker Support as a Therapeutic Medium

“…In so doing, they remained attentive and the empirical data suggests that there were often what Drake et al (2014) call "tipping points" or "moments that matter" in the slow process of change that key workers were alert to:…”