How evidence is building a better youth justice system

Over the last thirty years, research has considerably strengthened our understanding of what helps children move away from offending. Research on child development, desistance, identity, relationships, participation and the effects of contact with the justice system points in a broadly consistent direction. It shows that if we focus on helping children’s positive growth, we will also reduce offending and make communities safer, and that will critically mean fewer victims.

The Youth Justice Board (YJB) advocated for the ‘Child First decision-making framework’ to bring this extensive evidence base together and make it accessible and applicable for busy frontline practitioners. This framework encourages services to adopt policies and practices that are evidence-based and are according to four tenets which can be easily understood and remembered through ‘ABCD’[1]:

Early criticism of the traditional ‘risk-focused’ approach to crime by children argued that children should be viewed as children rather than offenders. This criticism helped build a strong case for reform, culminating in a major summary of modern youth justice research in 2018 by Haines and Case[2].

That evidence led to the key principles of the Child First framework. Originally, this model was named “Child First, Offender Second,” but the YJB dropped the “Offender Second” phrase in 2021 to ensure the primary focus remained entirely on supporting the child as the most effective way to reduce offending and make communities safer.

In a recent academic paper, Burns and Smithson argue that Child First risks operating as a “magic concept” that offers a “veneer of progress” while “masking enduring structural inequalities”. They further claim that the framework is “resistant to scrutiny and lacking in operational clarity”[3].