What the pandemic meant for children in the justice system

Public sympathy for children caught up in the justice system is limited. But the voices of children traumatised by solitary confinement and hugely disrupted education must be heard if we are to improve this unjust and underfunded system, says Hannah Smithson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Dropping your Guard: The Use of Boxing as a Means of Forming Desistance Narratives Amongst Young People in the Criminal Justice System

This paper discusses the relationship between the sport of boxing and desistance from crime. Working with young men in the English youth justice system, we co-developed a boxing workshop to explore the ways in which boxing creates avenues for the accomplishment of masculinity, and how these masculine scripts map onto desistance narratives and vice versa. We suggest that the sport of boxing is beneficial as an engagement tool, and demonstrates the power of sport in working with young men at risk of, or currently entrenched in criminal justice systems. We propose that the development of desistance narratives allowed the young men in this study to situate their masculine accomplishments in a hyper-masculine sport, and construct a narrative identity that reflected an openness to change. We propose that while boxing can be a beneficial vehicle for change, youth justice systems and funders of boxing programmes need to think more strategically about the use of the sport

All the colours of the rainbow.

Our perception of colour has always been a source of fascination, so it's little wonder that studies of the phenomenon date back hundreds of years. What, though, can modern scientists learn from medieval literature — and how do we go about it

Racially motivated offending and targeted interventions

This research aimed to identify the prevalence of racially motivated offending among young people in England and Wales and to shed light on the response to racially motivated offending within the youth justice system

‘Treating this place like home’: An exploration of the notions of home within an adolescent inpatient unit with subsequent implications for staff training

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Notions of home are deeply rooted in how we under stand our interrelational selves and where we fit in to the world around us. This qualitative research explored how young people, their families and staff on a United Kingdom (UK) psychiatric adolescent inpatient unit constructed meaning around the notion of home within the unit. Admissions on such units can range from a few days to many months, and understanding what young people, families and staff consider the unit to be – home, hospital, or something else – has significant clinical implications for both treatment and recovery. Eleven focus groups with staff, young people and families on a general adolescent inpatient unit were conducted and the data scrutinised using a discourse analysis. This re search suggests that discourses around role confusion, safety and the embodiment of home, attachment rela tionships and the contradictory positions of home or hospital were evident for all participants. Theories such as the reciprocal nature of attachment relationships be tween staff and young people, iatrogenic injury and at tachment ruptures between young people and parents all have a profound impact on an inpatient admissioand are often unspoken and under-operationalised. Clinical recommendations are made about the need for a paradigm shift in how admissions are understood for young people, how to manage the dilemmas associated with the unit becoming a home and what the subse quent training needs of inpatient staff are.publishedVersio

Boxing: can the sport really help turn young men away from violent crime

Boxing is often praised as a way of teaching discipline, anger management and teamwork. Now, with violent crime on the rise in English cities – especially among young men and boys – the sport is being used to support those at risk of being drawn into knife crime and gang activity. For instance, Channel 4 News recently featured a boxing academy in London, which provides alternative education for young people excluded from school, led by mentors who have experienced similar challenges

How can you punish a child for something that happened over a year ago?’ The impacts of COVID-19 on child defendants and implication for youth courts

The project on which this paper is grounded is the first in-depth empirical study of the impacts of COVID-19 on each stage of the English and Welsh Youth Justice System. We take the notion of a child's right to a fair trial as the lens by which we detail the findings from our research. The paper documents the experiences of professionals working in the courts and children who had contact with the courts during the pandemic. While we concentrate on processes in England and Wales as an exemplar of the impact of COVID-19, recognising that globally, courts were experiencing similar challenges, initiates a discourse about how to re-envision their role in wider criminal justice systems in a COVID-19 world. Our research demonstrates an urgent need for renewed consideration of what support children need to effectively participate in court, and where and how children's cases should be heard. The pandemic demonstrated that creativity is possible and creates a timely opportunity to review the evidence and think more radically about a welfare-based, trauma-informed court process for children