“Some of us need to be taken care of”: young adults’ perspectives on support and help in drug reducing interventions in coercive contexts in Denmark and the UK

Editorial DEPP: drug experienced young people in contact with the criminal justice system. Understanding the challenges and working towards solutions

“…show how accounts of both young people and professionals highlight the difficulty of combining an 'offender management' approach (Smith & Gray, 2019) with a 'children and young people first' approach (Case & Haines, 2015) and the authors conclude that practitioners need to be able to work flexibly, guided by their own experience and expertise in order to achieve positive engagement with young people. Importantly, both Frank et al (2020) and in the previous papers emphasize the need to consider what constitutes appropriate intervention approaches for young people with intersecting drug use and offending trajectories. These are important insights to take into account when developing and initiating new interventions or assessing already existing interventions (see also , Herold et al, 2019.…”

“…The paper also highlights how many young people's experiences with the CJS arise from the contradictions inherent to living in western societies where drug use is, to a certain extent, normalized (as emphasized by Measham & Shiner, 2009;Coomber et al, 2016), but still prohibited and punished. Frank et al (2020) examine young people's perspectives on drug reducing interventions. The authors argue that there is a lack of young peoples' perspectives both in the literature on users' perspectives on drug reducing interventions and in the literature on participation in several services at the same time.…”

Building Cultures of Participation: Involving Young People in Contact with the Criminal Justice System in the Development of Drug Interventions in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Italy and Poland

“…In all the countries studied, the young people had a number of complex and overlapping problems that they needed help to address including substance use, offending, homelessness, poverty, mental health issues, family and relationship difficulties, school exclusion, unemployment and child exploitation (i.e. in relation to drug dealing and county lines in the United Kingdom) (Duke et al, 2020; Frank et al, 2021; Herold et al, 2019; Rolando et al, 2021). Their narratives were often infused with experiences of trauma, disadvantage and deprivation.…”