Currently, there is a gap in knowledge about the context of convicted young people’s youth justice journey making and its treatment. Youth justice orders can break down as a result of absence, with sentence escalation and even custody becoming possible, if problems remain unresolved. Youth justice attendance can be as low as fifty per cent, with over twenty per cent of orders breaking down in some locations. Yet a lack of statistical detail makes it impossible to establish the extent of the problem. Low income households are over-represented in the youth justice population, and such groups can have limited access to transport while experiencing difficulties accessing essential local services. Subsequently, convicted young people’s youth justice journey making and treatment needs to be better understood in order to ensure responses remain proportionate, as per existing agreements. This thesis borrows ideas from the new mobilities paradigm, transposing them into a youth justice context, while remembering well cemented connections with social policy. Two mixed methods case studies will examine convicted young people’s youth justice journey making and treatment in locations where neighbourhood deprivation and youth justice order breakdown rates were at some of the highest in the country. Accessible visual research tools facilitated communication with young people and practitioners about youth justice journey making and absence management, to develop more fluid understandings of convicted young people’s youth justice journey making, and its treatment. The malleability and interconnectedness of journey making, attendance management and service delivery allows this research to make recommendations for national policy, local youth justice systems and individual practice. Importantly, the (re)production of convicted young people’s social inequalities as an unintended consequence of youth justice treatment, suggests the need for mobilities to have an elevated status in the delivery of social policies through youth justice services.

This study aimed to examine the impact of a Gallery-supported Arts Award programme on young people who have offended. Using a mixed methods approach, which principally employed qualitative and biographical techniques, this research embedded an innovative typology based on the memoirs of Brian Dillon. The typology helped to stimulate the memory recall of participants, and provided structure to the collation and analysis of the data. Conducted in two phases, I began by examining the impact of the Gallery-supported Summer Arts Colleges run from 2007 to 2011 on young people. In the second phase, impacts were explored through the experiences of young people who attended a Weekly Arts Award programme from 2012 to 2013. In all, six purposive young people participated in this study. The data was further informed by semi-structured interviews with Artist-Educators, Youth Offending Service Workers, session observations, Artist-Educator reflective journals, associated visual data and project reports. Conceptualising the Arts Award programmes as a type of 'rite of passage', I considered how young people could potentially be transformed. The findings from this study demonstrate how the two different programmes can cause a positive effect on the individual young people in their daily lives, as well as highlighting wider social impacts aligned to the Arts Award criteria and the impact assessments of Matarasso. In addition to discussing the implications of this study and providing future recommendations, the outcomes of this research showed that: (1) Arts Award accredited programmes as a type of rite of passage can improve the accessibility of art for young people who have offended; (2) they are effective in supporting young people in desistance from crime; and (3) the use of contemporary art and galleries as part of these programmes can help support young people's re-engagement with learning, thereby helping to transform 'young offenders' into 'young artists'.

The aim of this research was to investigate the relationships between a young person's gender and their access to the Ten Entitlements set out under Extending Entitlement. The Ten Entitlements were operationalised in this research to measure how able young people felt in accessing their rights in Wales. The research examined the influence of gender, as well as age and other aspects in a young person life, on how able young people felt in accessing their Entitlements. The research utilised a mixed methods approach using quantitative and qualitative data collection tools. An online computer based questionnaire collected representative quantitative data and focus groups collected qualitative data. This research found there were more Entitlements where young people perceived that boys had higher access to their Entitlements than girls. These findings support the intersectional feminist theory of a 'double whammy' of discrimination (Taefi, 2009). This research suggests that there are different areas where girls and boys perceived themselves least able to access their Entitlements. The age where perceived access to the Entitlements was lowest was aged 12 to 14, particularly for females, this was explained by difficulties with puberty and extra pressures of life. Key themes that have emerged to explain gender differences are girls being more enthusiastic yet more self-conscious, and the importance of stereotypes in young people's views. The research suggests that other aspects, as well as gender, were crucial in explaining perceived access to the Entitlements. Young people had higher perceived access to the Entitlements when positive experiences of family, friends and school were present and there were less negative experiences of antisocial behaviour, poverty and poor neighbourhood. The research has discovered that complex gender inequalities exist in young people's experiences of accessing their Entitlements and uncovered underpinning mechanisms related to young people's perceived access to their rights in Wales.

Young people who have experienced the secure estate as a result of being involved in offending behaviour are particularly vulnerable to poor life outcomes (unemployment, poor education, mental health difficulties, social exclusion etc.). This research project focusses on three young people's perspectives of their own transition from the secure estate into education, training or employment in order to contribute to the growing knowledge base around this population of young people. This contribution is in the form of an interpretation by the author of these idiographic accounts of transition. The young people were identified by professionals within the Youth Justice System. Each young person was interviewed about their experience of transition twice in the secure estate and once following release. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Converging themes emerged from all three participants around their experiences of social exclusion as young people involved in offending behaviour, and the challenge they perceived in separating from offending behaviour. Diverging themes emerged between the young people in terms of one young person's experience of institutionalisation, and two young people's goal directed approaches to transition. This research contextualises its findings in relation to existing literature and draws out recommendations for future research and educational psychology practice in relation to young people leaving the secure estate. This has implications for how young people are understood and supported through transition.

Recent crime and disorder strategies, formulated in response to the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, are structured around a multi-agency approach to preventing youth offending. This thesis critically examines the relationships between young people and the ‘place-based’ focus of the district-wide crime and disorder partnerships and their associated youth crime prevention projects. New Labour’s response to youth crime emphasises the re-establishment of social ties between young people and their ‘communities’, the development of social capital and the move towards socially inclusive strategies. Since 1999, young people, aged between 13 and 16 years, living in 70 ‘high crime’ neighbourhoods have been targeted by the Youth Justice Board’s Youth Inclusion Programmes (YIPs). Two projects located in neighbourhoods in south and west Leeds have formed the casestudies of this research. In Bradford, the research was supplemented by an additional project, the Prince’s Trust Volunteers (PTV), which worked with socially marginalised young people, aged between 16 and 25 years. This thesis offers valuable and contextualised insights into young people’s everyday geographies and social lives. Drawing on qualitative data gathered through ethnography, participant observation, focus groups and interviewing, the research develops understandings of the multiple, yet contested, meanings that young people attached to idea(l)s of ‘community’ and relates these to wider notions of social inclusion, social capital and citizenship. The findings demonstrate that many young people presently identified by agencies to be at risk of crime did not see themselves as ‘socially excluded’. Instead they firmly placed themselves in the micro-scale social networks of family and friends that structured both their interpretations of ‘inclusion’ and ‘community’. Young people’s interpretations of these same concepts were however fragmented and exposed underlying social tensions between themselves and other neighbourhood residents. The research is timely and produces a situated critique of interpretations of ‘inclusion’, ‘exclusion’ and ‘community’ held by both young people and partnership agencies, a consideration o f the policy implications of New Labour’s approach to preventing youth crime, and a sensitive appreciation of the relationships between young people, ‘community’ and place.

No description available.

This literature review examines the main psychological interventions for youth offending with a focus on Multisystemic Therapy (MST). As a large proportion of youth offending is carried out by youths diagnosed with Conduct Disorder, an overview of the nature of this disorder is firstly given. Traditional treatment approaches are then reviewed and the limitations of these are highlighted. A description and review of MST, which has been specifically developed for treating persistent juvenile offenders is provided, in which it is argued that this approach addresses the limitations of other psychological interventions. MST targets the known multiple determinants of Conduct Disorder and aims to intervene in the multiple settings that the youth and family are embedded. Although it is considered to have a relatively large evidence base, nearly all studies have been carried out by its developers, there is uncertainty about its 'active ingredients', and little is known about service users' experiences of MST. Qualitative research may be one useful approach to understanding the processes and outcome of MST from the perspectives of youth and families themselves.

No description available.

Government guidelines for mental health interventions emphasise the importance of taking young people's views into account. This review examines what is known from the adolescent's perspective in research investigating the outcome of psychological therapies. The literature in three mental health domains that are particularly relevant to adolescence is focussed on: anorexia nervosa, depression and antisocial behaviour. Both quantitative and qualitative studies are examined and what has been asked of adolescents is explored. This rev iew highlights what can be learnt from eliciting adolescents' views and considers how these v iews can better inform treatment.

Over the last 15 years, the youth justice system has expanded and taken on a life of its own, accommodating novel and diverse occupational ideologies within a managerialistic and neo-liberalist agenda, to realise New Labour’s aggressive reductionist targets. One of the unforeseen consequences of this strategy has been a gradual decline in ownership by youth justice practitioners of crucial forms of knowledge; critically that pertaining to mental health. This qualitative and interpretivist study attempts to assess how educators may bridge this gap. It focuses on the experiences and consequent requirements of a group of individuals who have all studied the youth justice discipline to BA level, many of whom are now experienced practitioners in this field. This thesis examines the association of mental health with crime, drawing heavily from Foucault’s oeuvre of archaeological works, yet shining the light on its specific impact on children and young people. The research methodology is developed through the lens of social constructionism and attempts to challenge the naivety of certainty that is often expected in late modernity. The findings are presented with one eye on participant requisites in the enhancement of their knowledge of mental disorder and the other on critical pedagogy which seeks to contextualise the results within society’s pre-ordered perception of ‘culpable’ children. It argues that the delivery of a university module encompassing mental disorder, learning disability and autism will assist youth justice practitioners to form more insightful assessments of the youth offending populace. In turn, this should assist in a movement away from increasingly defensive, punitive and exclusionary responses exercised by the police and court machinery; a shift from a control ideology to one of care. Furthermore, it is suggested that the timeliness of module development is in keeping with the conservative government’s emerging ideology of revisiting intricate professional judgement alongside a strategy of diverting children and young people from the youth justice system.