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Working with Parents in the Youth Justice System: Compulsory Help and 'Doing Good'
Abstract
This paper draws on interviews with parents of young people in trouble with the law, youth justice workers and with youth court magistrates, to investigate the operation of compulsory help through Parenting Orders. It traces the social policy approach of New Labour to 'failing' parents, explores the attitudes of those most closely involved in the youth justice context, and attempts to draw out some more general considerations for social work practice, including the attractions and costs of 'doing good' as a basis for compulsory intervention. Drawing on the success of previous social work practice, the paper argues that, rather than being drawn in the direction of compulsion, social workers ought to argue the case for voluntary assistance and resistance to the corrosive effects of social authoritarianism.
Adolescent to parent violence has historically been a silent problem, absent from official discourse surrounding domestic
violence, parenting or youth justice. In recent policy and legislation, adolescent to parent violence is increasingly being
recognized as a form of domestic violence; however, this conceptualization bears significant response implications. In this
paper, the challenges of responding to adolescent to parent violence within a domestic violence framework are considered,
including the characteristics of the parent–child relationship, parental responsibility in criminal justice, blurred victim/perpetrator
boundaries and the potential criminalization of children. Whilst recognizing the need for a criminal justice response, the
paper argues for a more nuanced, holistic and family focused approach, which avoids the responsibilization of parents or young
people.
Family Intervention Projects (FIPs) have received considerable political and media attention for their role in reducing anti-social behaviour within our most ‘troubled’ UK families. Although there has been some reference to FIPs within the academic literature, little has been concentrated on how they work in practice. In this study, we worked with two FIPs within Leicester City, focusing on keyworker’s perceptions of ‘successful intervention’. Keyworkers believe that the work they do enables families to take responsibility for their behaviour, while allowing them to learn new, more adaptive ways of coping with the stresses and strains of living in deprived circumstances. We analysed this within the context of ‘empowerment’ and ‘family resilience’. Although the current government has promised continued support for FIPs, we conclude that more research is needed to establish ‘what works’, for whom and under what circumstances. Although FIPs clearly do not work for all families, the consistent, long-term support provided by the FIP team can facilitate some families to make sustainable changes within their lives. It is clearly a welcome advance on enforcement-only approaches to tackling anti-social behaviour.
Adolescent to parent violence is a problem which remains largely unarticulated within youth justice policy literature and academic discourse in England and Wales. This article presents research evidence suggesting that adolescent to parent violence is a significant problem which needs to be clearly addressed in the youth justice policy agenda. Although it is widely recognised by practitioners and regularly encountered in their work, there is a ‘silence’ at the policy level and a lack of appropriate support services or responses. The article considers reasons for the absence of adolescent to parent violence in youth justice policy and argues for the importance of recognising and defining the problem and for the development of appropriate responses.
An ongoing commitment to tackling anti-social behaviour was a central part of the New Labour policy agenda throughout their 13 years in government. Their policy and practice became increasingly enforcement-led with the anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) at the cornerstone of their agenda. Police and local authorities came under pressure to see the ASBO, along with a whole range of other enforcement powers, as almost a panacea for tackling anti-social behaviour and, in particular, youth disorder. This article draws upon the literature, the authors’ own evaluation experience and recently released statistics from the Ministry of Justice and the British Crime Survey to examine the legacy of New Labour in terms of tackling anti-social behaviour. These are discussed within the context of the Coalition Government’s emerging ideas about how best to tackle anti-social behaviour, including their plans to abandon the ASBO along with other enforcement measures introduced under New Labour. We suggest that rather than abandoning the ASBO altogether, there may be advantages to ‘rehabilitating’ the ASBO within the context of a range of more far-sighted and proactive community-based measures. We discuss the lessons to be learnt from New Labour’s legacy and discuss ways forward within the context of coalition government policy.
New Labour is keen to use legislation to encourage what are seen as desirable family practices, and to discourage other, less-favoured, forms. What this means in policy terms has now been codified in its 1998 Green Paper, Supporting Families. In this paper, we examine the validity of this enterprise in terms of its underlying assumptions about social behaviour and economic decision making. We argue that the government implicitly assumes a universal model of 'rational economic man' and his close relative the 'rational legal subject', whereby people take individualistic, cost-benefit type decisions about how to maximize their own personal gain. Change the financial structure of costs and benefits, and the legal structure of rights and duties, in the appropriate way and people will modify their social behaviour in the desired direction. However, recent research suggests that people do not act like rational economic man in making decisions about their moral economy. Legislation based on this assumption might then be ineffectual and the proposals in Supporting Families seem to be one example. This is what we have labelled the 'rationality mistake'. In Part I of this work, we focus on the financial proposals in the Green Paper and on the New Deal for Lone Parents in particular. We then go on to counterpose this with the results of recent empirical work on how and why people actually do make family decisions. In Part II, to be published in the next issue, we focus on chapter four of Supporting Families, on strengthening marriage, and again compare New Labour's proposals with recent empirical work.
In popular and political debate there is currently a theme which dominates discussion about the family and this is the theme of decline and destabilisation caused by the rise of individualism and lack of moral fibre. There is a wishful thinking intrinsic to these debates in which it is hoped that the family can be returned to an idealised state, unaffected by other social changes. Recent sociological work on the family interprets changes to family life rather differently and therefore offers an important counter-discourse. Although there are certain limitations to the new theoretical work on the family provided by Giddens and Beck, it is argued here that their work provides a broad understanding of change which is not reducible to individual motivations and moral decline. These perspectives are particularly important at a time when family law is engineering policies to change the very nature of post-divorce family life. Because these changes are based on a narrow understanding of change, it is suggested that they amount to harmful tinkerings which misconstrue the wider context within which families are being transformed.
Derived from a more ambitious international youth justice research project, this article aims to critically interrogate the direction of contemporary youth justice policy in England and Wales and the political priorities that underpin it. By rethinking youth justice on the basis of comparative analysis, international human rights and research evidence, we challenge the current policy trajectory and offer an alternative formulation: a youth justice with integrity.
In recent years there has been a profusion of laws that punish parents for their children's offences. These parental responsibility laws are based on the assumption that parents of children who offend have not accepted their responsibility and that they can be made to do so by the imposition of court orders and financial penalties. In this article I will examine the efficacy of punishing parents for the crimes of their children. I will consider whether parental responsibility laws are an effective means of tackling youth crime; or should policies that strengthen the family and improve parenting skills be pursued as strategies for preventing juvenile offending behaviour.
This article has been published in the journal, Critical Social Policy [© Sage]. The definitive version is available at: DOI: 10.1177/0261018306062588 The paper’s starting point is an analysis of New Labour’s agenda for children in an emergent 'social investment state'. It provides an overview of policies for children, which simultaneously are investing in children and regulating children and their parents/mothers. Although children have moved to the heart of social policy, there is some disquiet about the way they are being positioned in this brave new world of social investment. This disquiet focuses in particular on: the construction of children as ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’; the paid work-focused and future-oriented model of citizenship; the relative neglect of groups of children who are not seen to represent such a good investment; and the eclipse of parents’, and in particular, mothers’ welfare. The final section sketches out how the social investment approach might be modified in the interests of children’s well-being and flourishing and with reference to principles of (gendered) social justice.
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
In his speech to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in July 1999, the UK Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, set out New Labour's vision for a system of education in which there is ‘excellence for the many not just the few’. He outlined what is essentially a bi-focal strategy for achieving this vision. The first focus is on the education system itself, the structures and practices that New Labour believes need to be in place if schools and services are going to meet the needs of all children and not just a privileged minority. The second focus is on the need to promote ‘a culture of achievement’, as, according to Blunkett, the vision ‘depends on changing attitudes as well as the system itself’. This paper focuses on this second strategy, more specifically the government's attempts to change the attitudes of parents. It is argued that this strategy aims to eradicate class differences by reconstructing and transforming working-class parents into middle-class ones, that it represents possibly the most important and far-reaching aspect of New Labour's policy agenda, and that it has not so far received the attention it deserves. The paper is in two parts. The first part sets out what is involved in New Labour's programme of re-socialization and explores the mechanisms by which New Labour is attempting to universalize the values, attitudes and behaviour of a certain fraction of middle-class parents. The second part develops a critique of this programme.
This article critiques the rise of parenting orders in Scotland within New Labour’s self-styled model of ‘respect’ and ‘responsibility’. It examines the emergence of parenting orders in Scotland, which became available in April 2005, and argues that Scottish local authorities are sceptical of an approach they perceive as an ideological and legislative mix premised on punitive notions of individual responsibility and justice.
On 1 June 2000 a new court order was implemented in England and Wales. The Parenting Order provided for the extension of state intervention (primarily through youth justice agencies) into ‘family life’. We have recently completed research with regard to youth justice parenting initiatives, and during the course of our research, our interest in, and concern with, the broader question of ‘parenting’, ‘parental responsibility’ and the ‘parenting deficit’ consolidated. This article sets out our principal concerns by locating the new statutory powers within their wider context. By tracing their historical antecedents, theoretical foundations and policy expressions we aim to critique the latest developments in state intervention. Similarly, by analysing the material circumstances of the parents who are targeted by such intervention, and reviewing the means by which children, young people and parents conceive such intervention, we argue that the new powers essentially comprise an extension of punitiveness underpinned by stigmatising and pathologising constructions of working class families.
After a year of frenetic activity New Labour's Crime and Disorder Act slipped quietly into the statute book on the last day before parliament's summer recess in 1998. Heralded as a radical shake up of criminal justice and youth justice, the major provisions of the Act are examined in this article and its likely impact on the treatment of young people is critically assessed. It does so by tracing how far the rhetoric of crime prevention represents a radical new departure or a continuation of the former government's commitment to penal populism. By unearthing the key foundational elements in Labour's agenda—authoritarianism, communitarianism, remoralization, managerialism—the article notes the significant presences and absences that are likely to be witnessed in youth justice in England and Wales by the turn of the century.
This article argues that communitarianism can be analysed on different levels—sociological, ethical and meta—ethical—and along different di mensions—conformist—pluralist, more conditional-less conditional, progressive-conservative, prescriptive-voluntary, moral-socioeconomic and individual-corporate. We argue that New Labour's communitarian ism is a response to both neo-liberalism and old social democracy. It is sociological, ethical and universalist rather than particularist on the meta-ethical level. Labour increasingly favours conditional, morally pre scriptive, conservative and individual communitarianisms. This is at the expense of less conditional and redistributional socioeconomic, progress ive and corporate communitarianisms. It is torn between conformist and pluralist versions of communitarianism. This bias is part of a wider shift in Labour thinking from social democracy to a liberal conservatism which celebrates the dynamic market economy and is socially conserva tive.
New Labour has paid considerable attention to citizenship. In this paper I explore the different ways in which citizens have been addressed and affected by New Labour policies, concentrating on four processes: activation, empowerment, responsibilization and abandonment. I argue that these different processes are not just the effect of looking at New Labour from different perspectives. Rather they need to be seen as linked in a political and governmental project that seeks to construct the unity of the nation and manage its internal diversity.
- Payne G.
The will to win. Speech to launch the social exclusion unit at the Aylesbury Estate
- T Blair