Unsettling Youth Justice and Cultural Norms: The Youth Restorative Action Project

Abstract

In a cultural milieu where adult views predominate, youthful voices are silenced and frequently invalidated. While the ‘otherness’ of young people renders them unique, it also justifies their exclusion as decision-makers in institutional arrangements that fundamentally impact their lives. Nowhere is this condition more evident than in the youth justice system. Youth are subjects of justice sanctioning without being its authors. In recent months the Youth Restorative Action Project (YRAP), a grass-roots youth organization based in Edmonton Alberta, has challenged this hegemony. As a Youth Justice Committee created and administered entirely by youth, YRAP forces state actors to revisit how the youth justice system should function. However, as this paper argues, the group must guard against co-option by the state through engaging in ongoing self reflexivity.

Notes

1. Using cultural artefacts as indicators of structural alterations in the meaning and experience of children, Philippe Aries (1962) and Neil Postman (1982) argue that childhood is a cultural construct and not a biological imperative or discursive formation. Postman, for example, locates a post-1950s shift coincident with the dissemination of new images of childhood broadcast via television that ‘recreate … the conditions of communication that existed in the fourteenth and fifteenth century’ (Postman 1982, p. 250). This gives the author reason for concern in that ‘Language is an abstraction about experience, whereas pictures are concrete representations of experience’. Pictorial representations put reason ‘to rout’ (Postman 1982, p. 73).

2. All names have been changed to protect the youth involved in this study. Interviews were semi-structured and involved open-ended questions.

3. The capricious and ad hoc implementation of the Young Offenders Act—the YCJA's predecessor—was a source of much criticism.

4. It is important to note that the YCJA did not usher in restorative justice or conferencing, for that matter. Quite the contrary. Hillian et al. (2004) note that while the YCJA formalized conferencing and YJCs, they have been in operation since the mid-1980s. While Alberta relies heavily on YJCs, they are not extensively utilized in Ontario and British Columbia.

5. The song was broadcast on CJSR, the University of Alberta radio station.