Kevin Haines

• Visiting Professor at University of South Wales

This chapter focuses on the genesis, development and implementation of a Children First, Offender Second approach to engaging with children who come into conflict with the law, with a particular focus on Wales—the birthplace of Children First. The chapter starts back in the 1990s and the regressive, repressive and anti-child movement that sprang fr...

The study assessed the changes in murder counts and patterns under COVID-19 conditions in The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Initial research indicates that crime rates and patterns have changed under the COVID-19 pandemic possibly because of government implemented restrictions. The specific impact of these responses on murder has not been examin...

This book is about society and the way it treats its children – particularly those who come into conflict with the law and the youth justice system. We intend to use the term ‘children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system’ throughout the book, for a number of reasons. Crucially, we have chosen to privilege the terms ‘child’ and ‘ch...

The previous chapter examined the potential of a Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS) approach to working with children subject to statutory orders in the youth justice system (YJS). In this context, putting children first in the YJS means abandoning the reductionist and disengaging management of risk and practice performance perpetuated by the...

The previous chapter set out the principles, practices and progression of the use of diversion within the youth justice arena. We identified ambiguities surrounding the preferred objectives of diversion (for example avoiding contact with the formal youth justice system (YJS), preventing offending, restorative justice, meeting individual needs by fa...

In Chapter One, we introduced Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS), a modern and distinctive model of youth justice that challenges established approaches grounded in welfare, justice, new orthodoxy and risk. CFOS is a principled, progressive and child-friendly model of positive youth justice, underpinned by the special treatment of children, ad...

The opening chapters have established a pressing need for an alternative, positive model of youth justice to counter the offender first excesses of traditional approaches to working with children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system. The modern context of youth justice is one rife with paradox in its negative views of children as:...

The previous chapter focused on policy, the divergences between England and Wales in terms of social and youth justice policy for children and the implications and potentialities for a distinct Welsh youth justice. We set out the evolution of a negative, restricted, managerialist approach to youth justice in England and Wales since the Crime and Di...

It is absolutely essential that all professionals in the youth justice system (YJS) have a guiding philosophy of practice for their work with children; a sense of objective and purpose to frame and animate their knowledge and skills bases. Without a coherent and explicit philosophy, policies and practitioner knowledge are simply information and und...

This topical book outlines a model of positive youth justice: Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS), which promotes child-friendly, diversionary, inclusionary, engaging, promotional practice and legitimate partnership between children and adults to serve as a blueprint for other local authorities and countries.

Society treats children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system in ‘special’ ways, but often with a negative focus, in relation to the perceived threat they present and the problems they may cause others, rather than offering children support and protection due to their vulnerability, lack of maturity and relative lack of power in soc...

The study assessed the changes in murder counts and patterns under COVID-19 conditions in The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.Initial research indicates that crime rates and patterns have changed under the COVID-19 pandemic possibly because of government implemented restrictions. The specific impact of these responses on murder has not been examine...

Purpose: To explore the integration of children’s voices within youth justice policy and practice development. Design/methodology/approach: The authors theorise the efficacy of participatory practices in youth justice by presenting original empirical data drawn from innovative child friendly methodological approaches, including activity-oriented fo...

Purpose: To explore the integration of children’s voices within youth justice policy and practice development. Design/methodology/approach: The authors theorise the efficacy of participatory practices in youth justice by presenting original empirical data drawn from innovative child friendly methodological approaches, including activity-oriented fo...

Traditional approaches to understanding and responding to children and crime are fundamentally based on ‘miniaturised’ adult models. The assumption appears to be that children are adults in the making, essentially just smaller, developing versions of grown-ups. This view of children is increasingly being challenged. Children are not simply putative...

The 1980s decade of diversion in UK youth justice consolidated critiques of iatrogenic systemic contact and generated an abolitionist momentum that was significantly reversed by the 1990s punitive turn and ‘new youth justice’ strategies of modernisation, expansionism, interventionism and risk management. However, the tentative rejection of risk man...

This article draws upon research undertaken in South Wales to understand children’s views concerning what it means to be a ‘victim’ of crime and their experiences, in that context, of engaging with the criminal justice system. Significantly, and moving beyond traditional policy and service provision concerns, child participants argued passionately...

Whilst Article 12 of the UNCRC states that young people have the right to participate in making decisions and that their views should be heard, this does not always occur. Especially in the context of policy development and service delivery, young people, despite wanting to participate, are often not able to influence decisions that affect them. Th...

What is the future for youth justice in England and Wales? In a current climate of divergence, normlessness and local variations, we explore reform recommendations and the impact of economic austerity on local Youth Offending Teams: a retraction of support/services, yet increasing oversight by non-specialist managers. Four emerging youth justice de...

A model of ‘positive youth justice’ has been developed on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge the hegemonic punitivity and neo-correctionalism of contemporary actuarial risk-based approaches and the conceptually-restricted rights-based movement of child-friendly justice. This paper examines the origins, main features, guiding principles and und...

This article outlines a social-ecological approach to understanding young people's prolific offending and effective youth justice responses to it. Seeing young people through the lens of interactions and relationships – with family, peers, community and the broader socio-cultural-political context – gives insight into the type of interventions that...

In contemporary youth justice in England and Wales, there is too much emphasis on offence- and offender- focused approaches and an insufficient focus on promoting positive outcomes for children in conflict with the law. What is more, since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the voices of children embroiled in the Youth Justice System have been margin...

This topical, accessibly written book moves beyond established critiques to outline a model of positive youth justice: Children First, Offenders Second. Already in use in Wales, the proposed model promotes child-friendly, diversionary, inclusive, engaging, promotional practice and legitimate partnership between children and adults which can serve a...

This article explores the concept of ‘prevention’ in youth justice, which is dominated by negative, retrospective, risk-focused, offender-first approaches that individualise the causes of offending by children and responsibilise children for failing to resist and negotiate these causes. We offer an alternative ‘prevention’ model that prioritises th...

Contemporary European youth justice practice, notably in England and Wales, fosters retrospective, risk-focused and reductionist views of children. Enforced, inequitable, prescriptive and adult-led youth justice relationships adulterise children and responsibilise them fully for their offending behaviour, disengaging them from constructive youth ju...

Young people are frequently exhorted to participate ‘more’ in decision making, both formally and informally. Paradoxically, no standard or comprehensively used measurement tool through which young people’s right to participate in decision making exists. However, a range of participation scales have been developed and these mainly adult-generated to...

This paper discusses the Swansea Student Engagement Project and presents findings from a survey conducted with undergraduate students and teaching staff to evaluate their degree of engagement with programme changes made in response to ongoing student feedback mechanisms and institutional pressures driven by the rapidly changing context of Higher Ed...

Chapter Six addresses the issue of developing risk assessment tools from a post-positivist complexity perspective and in so doing, challenges the dominance of positivist, reductionist, deterministic and linear, risk-based models of understanding and responding to young people’s offending behaviour within the field of youth justice in England and Wa...

This is the first book to explore the application of complexity theory to difficult practice issues in criminal justice and social work. Bringing together experts in this emerging field to address complexity theory from a range of perspectives, it provides a detailed but accessible discussion of the key issues to whole systems approaches.

The starting point for this chapter is that the historically dominant research paradigm in the social sciences, Positivism, is based on a misunderstanding and an oversimplification of methodological principles and that social scientific research, if it is to be fully ‘social’, requires a more reflective and reflexive paradigm. Positivist research m...

The growth of cybercommunities is a notable social phenomenon. Empirical studies of cybercommunities have described new forms of social behaviour that call for deeper conceptual analysis. Drawing on evidence from our research in the cybercommunity Second Life, the authors examine the sociology of cybercommunities through the lens of Giddens’ abstra...

We consider the prevailing views that cybercommunities have high levels of deviant behaviour due to three fundamental characteristics that they carry: (i) a considerable plurality of values; (ii) a lack of physicality; and (iii) a strong perception of anonymity. We analyse the roles that these three characteristics play in explaining the nature and...

The Swansea Bureau is an innovative initiative designed to divert young people out of the formal processes of the Youth Justice System. The Swansea Bureau extends beyond simple diversion grounded in minimal or non-intervention and into tackling the underlying causes of youth crime through mechanisms that normalise youth offending and promote prosoc...

The growth of cybercommunities is a notable social phenomenon. Empirical studies of cybercommunities have described new forms of social behaviour that call for deeper conceptual analysis. Drawing on evidence from our research in the cybercommunity Second Life, the authors examine the sociology of cybercommunities through the lens of Giddens' abstra...

This article evaluates the ‘Scaled Approach’ to youth justice adopted in England and Wales, compared with the ‘Children First’ approach adopted in Swansea. Using Youth Justice Board reconviction data, comparisons are made between the performance of the Scaled Approach pilot areas, Children First and all other Youth Offending Teams in England and Wa...

The intention of this paper is to contribute to the international debate on penal policy transfer by describing the development of a probation service in Romania following the policy transfer schema developed by Dolowitz and Marsh (1996). Both authors of this article played a role in the establishment of probation in Romania and this article provid...

A phatic technology’s purpose is to establish, develop and maintain personal and social relationships. The invention and development of phatic technologies, and their influence on human society, have been accelerating rapidly in the past decade, exemplified by the growth of social networking technologies based on the Internet. To understand this ac...

Advanced cybercommunities are communities in which perfect surveillance is possible – software tools allow everything to be observed, recorded, archived, pored over at a later date and acted upon. Hence, one expects that these surveillance technologies ought to be heavily used and effective in controlling deviance in these cybercommunities. Drawing...

Public opinion surveys largely neglect the ambiguity of ‘anti-social behaviour’, the complexity and nuances of public opinion and the utility of specifically youth-focused, localised research. This article sets out to address these issues through a comparative public opinion survey of experiences and perceptions of youth ASB conducted in Portsmouth...

The policy and practice of the Youth Justice System of England and Wales has become dominated by risk-focused, offender-first approaches underpinned by the deterministic, reductionist and psychosocially-biased risk factor prevention paradigm. Using the All Wales Youth Offending Strategy and the evaluation of the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Extendi...

This paper examines the prevalence of, frequency of and factors underpinning, substance use by young people. The research augments previous exploration of the causes of youth drug use by integrating factor analysis into traditional statistical techniques to identify composite risk factors for different forms of drug use (any drugs, soft drugs, hard...

This is the final report highlighting key findings from an evaluation of the "include" programme, which delivered multi-faceted support for substance using young people in Wales. The evaluation was designed and delivered by Swansea University in partnership with ARCS LTD.

This book aims to provide an understanding of youth offending and policy and practice responses, particularly the risk-focused approaches that have underpinned much recent academic research, youth justice policy and interventions designed to reduce and prevent problem behaviour. There has been growing concern, however, on the part of critical crimi...

The Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm (RFPP) has become increasingly influential upon government responses to youth offending. This paper critically evaluates `evidence-based' risk-focused research and prevention that coalesces around the RFPP. We highlight the significant issues that surround defining and measuring risk factors, difficulties in inte...

A public opinion survey of youth crime and justice was conducted with a sample of 496 people in Swansea. Gender and age differences in estimations of youth crime were compared to official and self-reported youth offending statistics nationally and locally. Attitudes to sentencing and preventative measures were evaluated with reference to Swansea's...

This paper examines the prevalence of, frequency of and factors underpinning offending in an opportunity sample of 3,088 young people aged 11–16 years in Wales. The research augments existing risk-focused research literature by exploring the relative salience of risk factors for active property and violent offending by specific gender and age group...

Restorative justice has become a core element of much youth justice policy and practice internationally. Within the UK, it has been incorporated into several aspects of the youth justice system, notably through new police cautioning procedures and referral orders. In this chapter we critically analyse restorative approaches to youth justice, focusi...

The multi-agency, multiple-intervention Promoting Prevention initiative to prevent youth offending in Swansea was evaluated with a computer-based interactive questionnaire with five hundred and eighty young people (aged eleven to eighteen years). Results indicate that multiple exposure to risk factors within the family domain significantly increase...

The multi-agency, multiple intervention Promoting Prevention initiative to prevent youth offending in Swansea was evaluated with a computer-based interactive questionnaire with 580 young people (aged 11–18). Results indicate that multiple exposure to risk factors within the main domains of the young person's life (for example, family, school) signi...

The purpose of this article is to set out Swansea’s response to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and related matters, which encompasses an explicitly universal, positive and young person-focused approach to crime prevention. This stands in contrast to more controlling or punitive practices developed elsewhere. Research into the multi-agency, multipl...

The multi‐agency, multiple‐intervention Promoting Prevention initiative aims to prevent drug use and youth offending in Swansea. It was evaluated using a computer‐based interactive questionnaire with 580 young people aged 11–18 years. Results indicate that exposure to risk factors within the main domains of the young person's life (family, school,...

Local monitoring in Swansea, Wales has identified a strong link between school exclusion and youth offending. This precipitated the establishment of the Promoting Positive Behaviour (PPB) initiative. A questionnaire based on the Mooney Problem Checklist (MPCL) was completed by 162 (124 control and 38 experimental) Year 10 and Year 11 pupils in Swan...

This article seeks to place the study of crime and criminals in the social policy context. Criminal careers research is critically evaluated and modern social trends are outlined as a background to an exploration of the interaction between criminological research findings and social policies for youth in trouble. A contrast is drawn between individ...

Introduction: Young People and Youth Justice Youth and Society Youth Justice: A Recent History Developing a Youth Justice Philosophy Managing Youth Justice Systems Managing Other Significant Systems Effective Work with Young Offenders Young People and Criminal Responsibility Bibliography

Chapter 3 summarised an understanding of systems management in the youth justice field, and suggested some important modifications to that approach. This chapter now moves on to consider the contemporary application of such techniques in practice, providing a detailed discussion of the implementation of effective systems management strategies at th...

Invernizzi, A 'Die Arbeit von Kindern: Gedanken zu den vielfältigen Überlebens-, Sozialisations-, Partizipations-und Ausbeutungserfahrungen' ('Children's work: some thoughts about the multiple and diverse experiences of survival, socialisation, participation and exploitation') in Von sozialen Subjecte. Kinder und Jugendliche in vershiedenen Welten,...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1995.