‘Back to Basics’: A Practice Approach to Reforming Youth Justice

Abstract

The delivery of high-quality case work is central to efforts to reform youth justice systems around the world. Youth justice practitioners can be the most effective agents of change when the focus of their casework practice is on listening to justice-involved young people, helping them to feel safe and to avoid re-traumatization, and working in ways that promote positive childhood experiences. It is argued that developing ‘practice-based evidence’ in this way can help to unite the field, to close the policy implementation gap, and simultaneously contribute to the personal wellbeing of young people and the broader agenda of public safety.

Keywords:

• Youth justice
• juvenile justice
• policy
• practice
• trauma-informed care

Critiques of youth justice systems around the western world have often assumed that legislators and policy makers need to arrive at a consensus about where they sit on a continuum between ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’ for substantive progress to be made (Young et al., 2017). Monahan, Steinberg, and Piquero (2015), for example, have described how – over time, and across jurisdictions – even the fundamental purpose of a youth justice system is contested. This, they suggest, has resulted in ongoing confusion about the extent that it is possible to protect justice-involved children from harm while, at the same time, also protecting the community from further offending. At the policy level, this lack of consensus has been apparent in relation to the pendulum that swings according to the politics of the day, from periods when the primary focus is on the ‘offense’ (e.g., the need for community safety and procedural justice) to when it is on the ‘offender’ (e.g., the need to address personal vulnerability and to offer children protections against ongoing maltreatment and harm). Whichever policy position is preferred, assumptions are also made about the superiority of particular epistemic norms and ontological systems (e.g., notions of ‘what works’ or ‘best practice’ versus ‘child-centered’ or ‘trauma informed’) (e.g., Galouzis & Day, 2021), even when there is no reasonable way to adjudicate between rival knowledge claims about the most appropriate responses to youth crime. This has resulted in a situation where there is frequent, ongoing, and often intractable disagreement between youth justice service providers and external stakeholders, with proponents of both the ‘justice’ and ‘welfare’ model of practice both convinced that they are correct (see also Smith, 2005) or where a common policy solution has been to assert that all positions are true and justifiable in their own terms. An example of this, in Australia, is the current policy positions of the different youth justice services across the eight different jurisdictions (ACCG, 2017; AIHW, 2023, see also AYJA, 2019). These each seek to accommodate calls for services to be more risk-focussed (Armytage & Ogloff, 2017), to be more trauma-informed (Day et al., 2023), and/or to be more compliant with human rights (Save the Children, 2023). What has resulted are policies that legitimate and endorse an extraordinary wide range of different services and programs – from those that might be regarded as ‘punitive’ (e.g., boot camps) through to those considered ‘restorative’ (e.g., diversion to family conference or mediation). Thus, while the development of a single, modern, and responsive system of youth justice remains an important goal both in Australia (Armytage & Ogloff, 2017) and elsewhere (Youth Justice Board, 2023), it seems likely that current policy directives cannot succeed in driving the reforms that are urgently needed to address the everyday challenges experienced by justice-involved children and young people. These problems are, of course, compounded by an absence of any sustained and convincing data to support the efficacy of any single approach to service delivery over another (see Case, 2021).

In this paper we take a different tack. We make a call to go ‘back to basics’– to step back from the politics of youth justice or even from efforts to identify areas where structural reform is required (such as changing the age of criminal responsibility; see Crofts, 2023, or the need to implement more diversionary programs and practices, see Wilson & Hoge, 2013). Instead, the focus is on the practice of youth justice professionals (i.e., case work) framed around the simple question of what it might mean for a statutory agency to work effectively with justice-involved children and young people. The challenge here is for service providers (predominantly youth workers and/or case managers) to best respond to the histories and the presenting needs of children and young people and to invite and encourage them to engage with the criminal justice system. This is in a context in which complexity is commonplace and the challenges of engaging young people are widely acknowledged. For example, four out of five youth justice involved children and young people in both community and secure settings will report more than four different adverse childhood experiences, with ongoing, clinically significant symptoms of trauma (Malvaso et al., 2024). Thus, this paper aims to present a set of ideas about how youth workers and case managers can be the most effective agents of change. It is, in essence, a practice piece that has been written to stimulate discussion in the sector about case work. It is not a review of the published literature identified through a systematic search strategy, although there is some level of methodological robustness in terms of the material presented. For example, the approach meets the quality criteria used in the assessment of narrative reviews (Baethge et al., 2019), such as to justify the importance of the topic, to clearly formulate aims, and to support key statements by extensive referencing.

Current youth justice practice: an overview

There has been surprisingly little discussion about the actual practice of case work in the youth justice literature, even though a range of practitioner induction, continuing professional development, and credentialing courses are now available (e.g., Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, 2023; see also the OJJDP National Training and Technical Assistance Center). This is despite the fact that most of the work carried out by youth justice agencies can be described in relation to the case work that is associated with the case management of justice-involved children in the community (Trotter, 2012). Case management typically involves (with differing emphases) elements of ‘brokerage’ (the identification of needs and referral on to ancillary and supportive agencies/services, see Vanderplasschen et al., 2007), and what has been described as ‘clinical case management’ (a combination of direct therapeutic work and generic case management components, such as engagement, assessment, planning, intervention, see Bland et al., 2009), with more intensive services often made available to those identified as at greater risk of re-offending or of higher complexity (e.g., those with co-occurring conditions, such as disabilities or mental health issues). The topic of ‘how’ to case manage is the focus of the current paper, rather than to consider the broader guiding principles for practice that are more widely discussed, such as the importance of attending to: (a) continuity of care; (b) forming genuine partnerships with young people, their families, and carers; (c) leveraging social supports and formal services to suit the young person’s changing needs; (d) tailoring the frequency, duration, and location of interventions to young person’s wishes and needs; and (e) facilitating the young person’s resourcefulness (see Moore, 2009; Smith & Newton, 2007; Suter & Bruns, 2009). Our attention on case work in this paper connects with, but has a different focus from, discussions about the need for rigorous implementation which often focus on the quality or integrity of structured intervention programs (e.g., Walker et al., 2015).

Recommendations about case work are, of course, available in the differentiated case management approach of the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model derived from an adult correctional model of service delivery through the idea of core correctional practice (Bonta & Andrews, 2016). This model has been widely applied in youth justice services (e.g., Brogan et al., 2015), as well as also being broadly compatible with what is described as trauma-informed care (e.g., Branson et al., 2017). Trauma-informed care is a universal approach that, at its core, is designed to do ‘no further harm’ to those who have experienced traumatic life events (Liddle et al., 2016). It is not only concerned with the provision of mental health services to address symptoms of trauma, but also with mitigating the risk of young people behaving in ways that can lead to re-traumatization or cause harm to others (Buckingham, 2016). For example, one way that youth justice centers have sought to reduce re-traumatization is to provide a structured and safe environment (e.g., regular meals, bedtimes, school times, expectations of behavior) such that basic psychological and health needs are met (Skuse & Matthews, 2015). This is, of course, despite a growing recognition that institutional youth justice settings fail to prevent re-traumatization and, at times, perpetuate abuse (see Clancey et al., 2020).

The assumptions that sit behind a trauma-informed model of youth justice are of particular interest to case work practice (especially in the community where the majority of justice-involved children and young people receive services), given that they are not premised on the belief that punishment and individual deterrence will change behavior. The goal of trauma-informed youth justice service delivery is to provide environments in which the sequalae of trauma are acknowledged and prioritized such that they can be processed and resolved (Liddle et al., 2016). The notion of ‘risk’ is thus conceptualized more as an understandable reaction to childhood adversity and trauma. In practice this means helping young people to feel safer, to better understand their experiences of maltreatment and adversity and, thereby, to support recovery, healing, and overall wellbeing. An example of this is the Trauma Recovery Model, developed by Skuse and Matthew (2015, 2018) for use in the English and Welsh youth justice service.

The trauma recovery model

Depicted in the form of a pyramid of practitioner tasks, this model offers a structure to help guide interventions that are provided by non-therapeutically trained youth justice practitioners (Evans et al., 2023; Skuse & Matthew, 2015, 2018). Based on the presentation of the child, their behaviors, and their current difficulties, the basic assumption is that supporting and maintaining child development is the central concern of any youth justice system – and that the presenting problems, including offending behavior, will diminish when these developmental needs are met. This model has implications for how the tasks of case work are conceptualized and, as such, a more detailed description of the Trauma Recovery practice ‘pyramid’ is provided next.

The trauma recovery pyramid has six levels that organizes and guides the types of interventions that could be provided by non-therapeutically trained practitioners when working with justice-involved children and young people. The two levels – at the bottom of the pyramid – draw explicitly upon Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of need and set the foundation for trauma recovery. The lowest, or first, level identifies basic safety and good physical care as the pre-requisite for healthy development and is predicated on meeting the everyday needs of the child through consistent, predictable, and reliable practice. The next, or second, level focusses on the development of trust between the child and the worker. For Evans et al. (2023), it is this central relationship that provides “the means through which opportunities for co-regulation, attunement, and interactive repair can be maximised – all of which are key drivers and maintainers of healthy development” (p. 10). Casework at this level can also be understood in terms of the need to offer as much consistency as possible, thus creating a secure base for the child from which trauma and adversity can begin to be processed with more conventional mental health and criminogenic interventions then considered. In this way these are considered foundational activities that should be universally provided.

The aim of the third, layer of the pyramid is to replicate the care that is routinely provided by parents and/or significant others in families (e.g., not leaving children to ‘fend for themselves’, to offer practical advice and emotional support with tasks such as education and employment applications, financial management, and finding secure accommodation). This extends to the need to provide ongoing support when children are living independently, with the dual aims of ‘keeping in touch’ and providing a ‘safety net’. The remaining three levels, at the top of the pyramid, then involve the delivery of specialist services, such as mental health treatment programs to address the sequalae of trauma. This is not case work and so not the focus of this paper, but nonetheless warrant mentioning as it is this type of treatment that is considered important to addressing the justifications and rationalizations that underpin offending behavior (see Wilmott & Jones, (2022)).

The knowledge and skills framework for the Scottish workforce (NHS Education for Scotland, 2017) also identifies specialist treatment as a fourth-tier specialist activity. As with the Trauma Recovery Model, the first tier of practice is labeled trauma informed – the baseline knowledge and skills required by everyone in the workforce; the second as trauma skilled – the knowledge and skills required by all workers who have direct and/or substantial contact with individuals who may be affected by traumatic events; and the third as trauma enhanced – the knowledge and skills required by workers who have more regular and intense contact with individuals who are known to be affected by traumatic events, and who provide specific supports or interventions. The fourth tier, trauma specialist, refers to the knowledge and skills required by staff who play a specialist role in directly providing or managing evidence-based psychological interventions or therapies to individuals affected by traumatic events.

Trauma treatment

While specialist therapies will typically require a referral outside of youth justice (i.e., to a specialist mental health service), it seems reasonable, in light of what is known about the prevalence of trauma in the youth justice population to expect all staff to have trauma enhanced level skills and knowledge and to help to manage trauma and promote self-regulation. For example, Greenwald (2009) has described a phase-oriented approach to trauma where the first stage is concerned only with safety and stabilization as staff help to identify trauma trigger situations and model healthy responses. This then serves as first steps in preparation for participation in more intensive therapeutic interventions but is considered as an important outcome in its own right (Skuse & Matthews, 2018).

A good example of a specialist therapy for trauma is Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT; Taylor, 2021) which has been used as a clinical intervention for adolescents in secure settings (e.g., Damavandian et al., 2021; Ribeiro da Silva et al., 2021). Forensic CFT embraces the evolutionary routes of human harmfulness by identifying the core processes that drive the readiness to harm others. The therapeutic aim here is to support children to develop a compassionate (rather than shame inducing) understanding of their harmful behavior and then to help them develop competencies and motives to develop a harm-free lifestyle. In this way, risk is addressed alongside a sensitivity to trauma and the development of competencies that promote healthy lifestyles, while working simultaneously across the biopsychosocial domains (see Taylor, 2021).

Case work practice

The identification of these trauma-informed models of youth justice is important in so far as they each draw attention to the specific challenges of working with justice-involved young people, and the importance of approaching casework practice with a strong understanding of the barriers that arise to engagement in a context of often multiple experiences of adversity and maltreatment. They speak directly to how casework might proceed, even when there is an absence of evidence to directly link this type of practice to service level outcomes. Indeed, a key issue for youth justice agencies is how to understand the lack of evidence that exists to show that any one approach to practice results in better outcomes for children and young people than any other.

It is important to note that this is a different question to those asked about the strength of evidence to support ‘program’ outcomes of course, especially given that trauma-informed practice is regarded as a set of principles rather than as a discrete intervention. Nonetheless, a recent umbrella review (a synthesis of existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses) of trauma informed youth justice practice, concluded that there is a pressing need to establish the connection between service activity and outcomes (Malvaso et al., 2024), with another review by the same team concluding that “one of the most striking limitations of our work [on trauma-informed practice; TIP], however, relates to the [absence of] evidence to support the argument that implementing TIP will result in a reduction in re-offending in young justice-involved people” (Day et al., 2023 p.8). The authors do note, however, that similar challenges also arise with alternative approaches, such as the Risk Needs Responsivity approach (e.g., given the problems that have arisen when trying to demonstrate that criminogenic programs do actually result in a reduction in dynamic risk and, the extent to which this translates into longer-term behavioral change at both the individual and group level). Other approaches, such as Restorative Justice programs (e.g., mediation, conferencing), also have a limited evidence base, as well as often only being made available at certain stages of the criminal justice process and/or for certain people (e.g., eligibility is typically limited to those who have acknowledged guilt for offending behavior; Johnston & Van Ness, 2013). The same observations apply to approaches in youth justice that are based on the rights of the child (see Save the Children, 2023) although, once again, there are also obvious opportunities to apply the general principles of criminogenic interventions, restorative justice, and child rights in case work practice. The conclusion that we would draw here though is simply that significant challenges arise in attempts to apply any form of evidence-base to youth justice service delivery (and these arise even in relation to structured group programs such as multi-systemic therapy; e.g., Letourneau et al., 2013) and that, in many ways, the inherently individualized nature of youth justice service delivery makes most current approaches unfalsifiable. The problem of evidence-based youth justice is further compounded by a reliance on criminal justice statistics to determine efficacy, particularly in circumstances when definitions and counting rules for re-offending vary (e.g., in South Australia, breaches are counted as new offenses but they are not in other Australian jurisdictions) and when young people ‘age in’ and ‘out’ of crime (see Shulman et al., 2013; Siennick & Pupo, 2022).

The focus of this paper is on how non-clinically qualified youth workers and case managers can deliver high quality case work. This resonates with the work of Dix and Meade (2023) that identifies the importance of three themes relevant to effective practice: the behaviors, values, and personal qualities of the worker; the professional knowledge base, reflection, and curiosity that they bring to the work; and the ‘what of the work and how to do it’. They label this the ‘IDEAS’ framework, based on Influence (practitioners to explore and become aware of their role and how it is defined in law), Delivery (professional tools and systems that support practice), Expert (knowledge and theory), Alliance (the ability to develop trusting relationships with children and their personal and professional networks), and Support (encouraging and supporting resilience in staff). In what follows however, we focus on three specific elements of practice that represent the more relational aspects of the work. These map on to both the lower levels of the Skuse and Matthew (2015, 2018) Trauma Recovery Model pyramid and the ‘Alliance’ component of IDEAS and apply to work with all justice-involved children and young people.

A framing of the core tasks of youth justice practice based on the need to be child-centered is proposed, with the purposes of assuring those who have experienced trauma that they are safe, of explaining that they are not responsible for what happened, and of being patient regarding the time needed for healing to take place (SAMHSA, 2023). Accordingly, we identify an overarching need for youth justice workers to aspire to practice in a trauma-informed way by: (1) listening carefully to children to better understand their developmental needs; (2) offering safety by stabilizing and containing responses to trauma and by responding positively and constructively to challenging behavior; and (3) providing opportunities for personal growth that promote resilience and strengthen opportunities for more prosocial pathways into adulthood.

It will be immediately evident that each of these three recommendations for practice is intentionally focussed on the promoting strengths of the child. In line with trauma-informed approaches, the focus is firmly on: listening more carefully to better understand the experiences of the child and runs counter to adopting a position of power and expertise; the need to promote physical and psychological safety prohibits the use of punishment or service responses that can retraumatize; and the provision of additional opportunities for personal growth as a basic aspect of youth justice case work which contradicts practice that incapacitates or coerces conformity. A particular advantage of conceptualizing the practice of youth justice in this way is that it may also help to acknowledge the impacts of structural injustice (and our communal absence of responding to the harms experienced by some children, or the inequalities in how we do). To simply locate the ‘problem’ of youth crime as the dysfunction or pathology of the child, while potentially appealing in terms of its simplicity, is to misunderstand the role that any youth justice system has to play in society (see Carlton & Russell, 2023). It is particularly important to practice in ways that do not situate children within a discourse of risk that constructs them as dangerous and as ‘governable’ (McGregor, 2017) or that conceptualize the role of the youth workers simply in terms of containment. A recent analysis by Tuttle (2023) has, for example, shown criminal activity of justice-involved children and young people can be expected to increase through to mid-adulthood, after which many young people naturally desist from offending (see also Payne & Piquero, 2020). This means that youth justice services have a growing role to play in actively preventing an escalation of offending behavior and subsequent entrenchment in the adult criminal justice system.

It is also important to make it clear that this ‘back to basics’ approach does not imply that there is no place to focus on offending behavior in youth justice or to provide criminogenic programs (Lipsey et al., 2010), despite critiques of this approach (see Case, Browning, & Hampson, 2023 for further discussion). There is still the need to meet the community expectation that youth justice agencies will effectively manage risk (Arymtage & Ogloff, 2017); however, the way to do this from a developmentally focused and trauma-informed perspective is to link the risk mechanisms that arise from adversity and maltreatment to triggering processes for offending for each individual child. In circumstances where there is only limited access to comprehensive adolescent mental health services, this highlights the need for the specialist services and programs to address trauma responses that are identified in the higher levels of the trauma recovery model (Skuse & Matthew, 2015, 2018). For Jones (2019), common trauma processes that are relevant to risk include triggering reminders, revenge thoughts, fantasies and plans, a need to please peers, and exposure to drugs. McLaughlin et al. (2020) further provides an explanation of how childhood trauma may be casual in a range of both internalization and externalizing problems later in life, through social information processing (enhanced threat detection and hostile attribution bias), emotion processing (heightened emotional reactivity and poor emotional regulation) and accelerated biological aging (pubertal timing and cellular aging), as well as through one protective factor (social support). Similarly, Ford and Russo (2006) have suggested that early childhood victimization may lead to the dysregulation of emotional and social information processing, resulting in severe and persistent problems with oppositional-defiance and aggression, which is then compounded by post-traumatic reactivity and hypervigilance. De Ruiter et al. (2022), in their review, further suggest that the emotional numbing and feelings of detachment that may result from trauma can induce callousness and a lack of concern for others. Put simply then, it is reasonable to expect that the key presentations of trauma (e.g., impulsivity, risk-taking, and low self-control) will reflect important criminogenic needs (see Fritzon et al., 2021) and, as such, we see no major contradictions between practicing in the ways outlined in this paper and a risk management model. The key point here is that the starting point for any attempt at service delivery has to be a strong understanding of the psychological context that sits behind the experience and expression of criminogenic need and to identify ways of working with children that will meet their developmental needs. Thus, this paper is not about the relative efficacy of different models or approaches, but on identifying those critical features of effective case work that are likely to be embedded in all of the different models of youth justice service delivery that are currently being implemented.

Enhancing practice in three key ways

Listening to children

The first area is concerned with the relational stance that the youth justice practitioner adopts in interactions with the child. Work here is predicated on a specific orientation and set of practitioner skills that are, in an important sense, based on the idea of compassion – a key characteristic of all effective human service delivery. For an organization to show compassion for its clients, all staff need to develop competencies in what Gilbert (2014) refers to as ‘knowing awareness’, ‘empathic awareness’, and ‘knowing intentionality’ which are, at the simplest level, determined by the ability to listen to empathize better with lived experience.

The first step in developing compassion in youth justice is to cultivate curiosity about the child as an individual. This requires, as a minimum, at least some understanding of the significant histories of maltreatment and adversity that justice-involved children typically carry, and which place them at ongoing risk of harm. For those in settler-colonial societies, this includes an appreciation of how State-endorsed intergenerational legacies of family separation and cultural loss will inevitably affect the willingness or, at times, the ability to engage with services (noting here that the expectation should be placed on the service and not on the child; that is, that the service should create a safe and inviting environment that facilitates engagement, see Blagg, 2016). Listening carefully to the experiences of those who continue to experience racism and discrimination, whose language, culture, and practices are not valued by the society, and who experience other challenges resulting from structural inequities (Scott & Jenney, 2020) is a prerequisite for effective youth justice practice.

For those justice-involved children who have been subject to maltreatment, the experience of not being believed – particularly by parents or significant caregivers – may be both painful and associated with anger and/or feelings linked with perceived betrayal. It should be anticipated that a significant dynamic will arise when children feel that they are not being believed by the youth justice worker (especially when being asked to talk about a traumatic life event or experience, but also about offending behavior). The risk of repetition of not being listened to, or even the fear of it happening again, may be a real barrier to the formation of trust and result in children presenting themselves in particular ways (such as being less truthful) that make it harder for the youth justice practitioner to listen. Goldenson (2023) has also considered how some of the most common (and problematic) misinterpretations of trauma presentations can inhibit the ability to listen. These include the assumption that hyper-arousal is indicative of ‘antisociality’, that hypo-arousal and or emotional numbing is indicative of ‘callousness’, and that poor narrative memory is indicative of a lack of credibility. Goldenson further identifies the importance of attending to a series of cues for detecting dissociation (e.g., prolonged blank staring, repeatedly losing track of the conversation or needing questions to be re-stated, denial of information already reported earlier in the interview, suddenly becoming ‘spacey’ or ‘sleepy’ when discussing emotionally difficult topics). She suggests that when these dissociation cues are present, it is particularly important to listen to responses to questions about immediate experience (e.g., ‘how do you feel about being here today?’, ‘what was your experience in the last few moments?’) to identify when trauma responses are present.

The importance of listening to justice-involved children is now widely accepted, with a ‘client-centred’ or ‘child-first’ approach now firmly embedded in youth justice policy in England and Wales (Case & Hazel, 2023; Youth Justice Resource Hub, 2022) as well as across other parts of the world. It is supported by evidence that collaboration is a key component of effective supervision (Andrews & Bonta, 2008), with the ability to be ‘non-blaming’ often identified as a core skill (Trotter, 2012). In addition, the intentional use of listening to provide opportunities for personal reflection and the development of new narratives (McAdams, 1993) is considered critical to the process of desistance, which is thought to involve a reconfigured identity and forming a new conceptualization of a desired future self (see Farrall & Calverley, 2006).

Promoting listening in case work practice

The most obvious way to promote listening is to provide training for all youth justice staff in basic counseling skills. There are numerous resources available to support this (e.g., Nelson-Jones, 2012), with opportunities to access training and supervision widely available, both face to face and online, and internally by accessing the expertise of youth justice mental health professionals. For example, the US Office of Justice Programs, Advancing Youth Development curriculum for youth workers (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/advancing-youth-development-curriculum-training-youth-workers) offers material relevant to seven discrete training modules (introduction to youth development, developmental outcomes, cultural assumptions and stereotypes, strategies of youth participation, opportunities and supports, core competencies, and review) that can help practitioners to better appreciate the personal context in which justice system involvement occurs and thus attend more closely to the child’s experience. Additional opportunities to listen to those who are in receipt of youth justice services arise by encouraging participation and collaboration activities, sometimes referred to in terms of ‘co-planning’, ‘co-production’, ‘co-design’, and ‘co-governance’ or ‘co-management’ (Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, 2023; Verschuere et al., 2012). This typically involves inviting justice-involved children to come together to discuss their experiences and to share ways that services might be improved and to invite the practitioner to hear how services are being received, rather than make assumptions about engagement. There are many other opportunities to promote listening, for both the individual and collective, especially given ample evidence that justice-involved children are often interested in being heard – and are willing to contribute their views and share information about their experiences and concerns (Creaney & Burns, 2024; Mounty Yarns, 2023).

Ensuring safety

Listening to justice-involved children is a prerequisite for creating an emotional environment in which they can feel safe and better able to trust both the practitioner and the agency. To be truly trustworthy, however, it is important to not offer assurances that engaging with the worker will always be helpful (i.e., it is not always possible to resolve the presenting issues; Goldenson et al., 2022), especially when there is limited time (e.g., when children are serving short orders). In this respect, seeking informed consent for providing any youth justice service is of central importance, as it is indicative of transparency. There are also numerous ‘small’ opportunities to provide children and young people with choices. These include where to sit, offering breaks as needed, and making basic comforts available, such as tissues and water. Middleton (2012) has also described how there are logical therapeutic responses to those who have encountered abusive relationships. For example, the absence of boundaries in abusive relationships requires a response from youth workers that models sound boundaries (e.g., being reliable, being on time). Showing acceptance is also often important for those who have been rejected, as is stability and predictability for those who have lived with chronic uncertainty. Finally, it is important to also remember that power differentials will be magnified when assessing individuals who are incarcerated and/or come from marginalized backgrounds, and the need to listen carefully and provide opportunities for choice and collaboration (e.g., cultural humility, see Lekas et al., 2020) as one means of mimimizing these.

A key element of case work practice that contributes to a child’s sense of safety is the way in which conflicts are resolved, whether this involves prevention, de-escalation, or crisis management. Challenges arise in attempts to balance the safety of staff with those of children, particularly in residential or institutional settings. It follows that the physical environment should be welcoming and comfortable, with options to respond to escalations in emotions and behavior. These may be both physical (e.g., access to withdrawal areas, alarms, lockable doors), as well as administrative (e.g., ensuring staff are not working in isolation), and related to training (e.g., recognizing and diffusing escalation). It may also be the case that when a child is perceived to be less sensitive to others’ feelings or perhaps less able to feel fear because of their previous experiences, more punitive strategies will be employed by staff. At times, these may be justified because the individual is seen to be unresponsive to less ‘harsh’ interventions, resulting in treatment that lacks empathy and is blaming and stigmatizing (see Wilmott & Jones, 2022; Meloy, 1992). However, it remains the case that most elements of safety are relational and will be influenced by how children are treated – by not dehumanizing or labeling, by listening, by not requiring them to continually re-tell their ‘story’, and by failing to provide choice or opportunities to provide feedback. These are thus identified as core practice skills in youth justice. It is here again that Goldenson et al.’s (2022) explanation of common misinterpretations of trauma are important. Clinical knowledge about how best to stabilize and contain responses to trauma can also inform more positive and constructive responses to challenging behavior (Scott & Jenney, 2023).

Promoting safety in case work practice

To improve safety, training staff in the use of universal trauma screening and referring on for specialist trauma-specific assessment and evidence-based intervention (Zettler, 2021) represents an important first step. There are also several programs and interventions that all youth justice staff can be trained to deliver. The following have all been implemented in youth justice settings: The Sanctuary Model (Kramer, 2016); Think Trauma (Marrow et al., 2012a); Trauma Affect Regulation: Guide for Education and Therapy (TARGET) (Marrow et al., 2012b); The Attachment, Self‐Regulation, and Competency (ARC) Model (Hodgdon et al., 2013); The Secure Stairs Framework (Taylor et al., 2018); and Partners for Change Intervention (Jankowski et al., 2019). A minimum expectation here is that psychoeducation is provided to help the child and worker to better understand what a traumatic event is, how experiencing trauma affects them, and how trauma-related symptoms are perpetuated long after the event has occurred (see Black et al., 2012). This can be followed by work to strengthen coping skills (e.g., relaxation skills, and identifying triggers and methods of expression) and, for staff, involve specialist training in positive behavior management (e.g., Ministry of Justice, 2020).

Improved awareness and understanding of trauma can provide important clues about the specific situations in which risk might escalate. An important role for youth justice staff here is to improve the ability of other services who may also be involved with children (e.g., education, health) through advocacy to help recognize and preempt problematic trauma-based responses. There may also be a role for youth justice practitioners to engage with the wider community to reframe dominant narratives of children who are in the justice system (e.g., as ‘out of control’ or as ‘lacking empathy’) toward more sophisticated and accurate understandings of how a range of factors – including historical events (e.g., maltreatment and abuse), situational factors (e.g., family breakdown), and the escalation of distress and dysregulation (e.g., suicidal ideation) – can combine to create the situations and circumstances that precipitate children’s offending behaviors.

Providing positive childhood experiences

A third key component of case work practice is to provide opportunities that promote resilience and strengthen pathways into adulthood. Actively facilitating access to positive life events (be they positive school/work experiences, supportive relationships with peers and family, involvement in structured activities such as sports/leisure groups, engagement with cultural activities) is foundational to both engaging justice-involved children and to helping them to lead non-offending lifestyles. There is, for example, a growing body of research to show that not only are positive childhood experiences associated with lower levels of psychopathology and improved well-being, but that they can also promote adaptation when there is a history of childhood adversity (e.g., Bethell et al., 2019). For example, in one study that involved undergraduate participants, Hou et al. (2022) showed that adverse childhood experiences and positive or ‘benevolent’ childhood experiences could not only predict psychological distress independently but also that exposure to positive experiences counteracted the negative effects of adversity in leading to psychological problems. Elmore et al. (2020) further demonstrated that building child resiliency and ensuring that children have a supportive environment can reduce the impact of adverse childhood experiences on depression. In other words, the provision of positive life events can have reparative effects and promote resiliency going forward. While there is some evidence that providing positive childhood experiences may have a moderating effect in the association between adversity and offending behavior (Kowalski et al., 2023; Novak & Fagan, 2022), further research is needed to understand how the provision of positive childhood experiences can be enhanced in youth justice settings. There is also some evidence that the case worker skills that have the strongest associations with reduced reoffending are the use of rewards and a non-blaming approach, including pro-social modeling and reinforcement (Trotter, 2012; Trotter & Evans, 2023). Thus, providing positive experiences through the relationship formed with the worker is also likely to have benefit.

Recommendations for policies and initiatives to foster positive childhood experiences can now be found in the National Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Childs, and Adolescents (Hagan, Shaw, & Duncan, 2017). In addition, the Health Outcomes of Positive Experiences (HOPE) framework and the Prioritizing Possibilities agenda both support the extension and implementation of evidence-based proposals for promoting positive childhood experiences across human service, clinical, and public health settings (see Bethell et al., 2017; National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2019). There have, however, been few published reports of how this work might be applied to a justice-involved population, especially in late adolescence, even though we would suggest that this is likely to be key to effective practice. This was certainly a conclusion from McGregor’s (2017) analysis of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with case managers from 9 different non-government organizations in Australia. All 21 informants implied that it was ‘doing the fun stuff’ that brought about the most significant change for children. For McGregor, this pointed to the inability of case managers to interact with their clients until strong personal relationships are established, although we would argue that this is not only a pre-requisite for effective practice (i.e., building rapport so that interventions can then be received), but also potentially sufficient in its own right.

Promoting positive childhood experiences in case work practice

Positive childhood experiences can be measured using the Benevolent Childhood Experiences (BCEs) scale (Narayan et al., 2018), with ten items (at least one safe caregiver, at least one good friend, beliefs that gave comfort, enjoyment of school, at least one teacher who cared, good neighbors, another adult who provided support or advice, opportunities to have a good time, positive self-image, predictable home routine) reflecting retrospectively reported childhood experiences and resources drawn from family and other close relationships, aspects of personal identity, and a positive and predictable quality of life during childhood. These items could easily be adapted for use as key domains for assessment and case planning in youth justice, whereby consideration is routinely given to different ways that the practitioner can purposefully work toward goals in these areas. For example, practitioners could work to strengthen relationships with significant others (caregivers, neighbors, friends, teachers), while also offering activities that provide pleasure, promote a positive self-image, and encourage routine. It is also the case that the creation and promotion of positive childhood experiences will depend on the ability to engage families, carers, and communities, as well as other stakeholders in healthcare, education, and social services. And so, youth justice workers should be encouraged, where possible, to not only provide direct services that promote positive childhood experiences but also to broker access and entry into other services that offer these experiences (e.g., in both the government and the non-government sector). Again, while this type of activity already occurs in youth justice case work, it has been noted that staff can be concerned about how the interpersonal technology of being a ‘friend’ can conflict with the maintenance of their role as a professional worker (McGregor, 2017). Accordingly, the intention here is to promote the centrality and legitimacy of these activities to achieving optimal outcomes for justice-involved children.

Some caveats and considerations

There are a number of caveats to our position which are important to acknowledge, one of the most important of which is to note the diversity that exists both within (e.g., community youth justice and detention or secure care) and between different jurisdictions. It is not always realistic to offer blanket advice about practice, when such variation exists about what even constitutes a juvenile or youth justice service. In Australia, for example, the age of criminal responsibility is typically 10 years (Crofts, 2023) with the adult correctional system used for those aged 18 years and over. In Scandinavia, however, the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years, meaning that a juvenile justice system – at least as configured in Australia and elsewhere – does not exist, with non-custodial sanctions universally applied to younger children. Dempsey (2020) has, for example, reported that in 2015 there were only thirteen children aged 15–17 years in prisons in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark combined. Nonetheless, the three areas considered in this paper are sufficiently broad so as to accommodate practice with justice-involved children of all ages and of different levels of engagement with the criminal justice system, including those who are unsentenced.

A second limitation concerns the assumption that trauma is the causal mechanism in the offending behavior of all justice-involved children. Whilst experiences of adversity and maltreatment are undoubtedly commonplace, the impacts are neither linear nor cumulative. We cannot assume that any single incident of maltreatment or experience of adversity is significant or, indeed, that more experiences is somehow ‘worse’ (this is the idea of ‘multifinality’), or that the same life event will have the same impact on every person. However, if we can accept that past experiences influence present behaviors, then working in more trauma-informed and compassionate ways is at least unlikely to have iatrogenic effects.

It is also important to acknowledge that this practice advice may be self-evident to those who are experienced and skilled in working with justice-involved children and young people. However, in a context in which there are competing demands to fulfill risk management, administrative, and brokerage roles, there is still a need to underscore their importance, legitimacy and centrality (Frankel & Gelman, 2012). This may help to promote continuing professional development activities in the skills that are required for case work. In doing so, some of the potentially iatrogenic effects of youth justice system involvement, including practice that is either overly risk-averse (Day, 2022) or overly administrative and bureaucratic (Fox, 2015), may be reduced.

We have not attempted to consider all elements of effective youth justice practice in this paper (see Trotter & Evans, 2023). There are many different tasks involved in this that have been considered in some detail elsewhere (e.g., case management, Trotter et al., 2015; transition planning, O’Neill et al., 2020). This attempt to identify some very specific case work approaches and to promote their adoption across an agency complements this work and contributes to the development of higher-level descriptions of practice (i.e., ‘practice frameworks’, see Ward & McDonald, 2022) that themselves form a bridge between policy, regulations, and legislation. It is anticipated that these may help to circumvent some of the political disagreements about the very purpose of youth justice that stifle service improvement and maintain the status quo in a context in which evidence of effectiveness is strongly contested and where reform is needed. The focus on case work represents an attempt to close what is commonly referred to as the ‘policy implementation gap’ (Vaswani & Paul, 2019) – and specifically, a lack of practitioner support or engagement with policy reform. Case et al. (2020), for example, describe high levels of cynicism – quoting practitioners as subscribing to the view that “a lot of so-called new practice is actually a rebranding of old, proven practice” (p.227). This focus on casework should, to some extent, help to facilitate policy-practice collaboration by recognizing the importance of ‘practice-based evidence’ (Margison et al., 2000) to innovation in youth justice.

Finally, it is important to reiterate that the intent of this paper is to promote discussion about casework. It does not aspire to being a synthesis of evidence that might be expected from a scoping or systematic review. This is intentional, and despite the attempt to (rather heavily) reference many of the statements that are made, it is nonetheless the case that professional and research evidence cited in this paper was selectively identified. At the same time, we would argue that a breadth of different youth justice approaches is accommodated within the three ‘back to basics’ proposals.

Concluding remarks

In this paper we have approached the task of youth justice reform by identifying some specific aspects of practice that we think should underpin effective service delivery. The three elements of case work described here can be reasonably expected to help children and young people to feel heard, to feel safe, and to develop more optimism about the future. In doing so, encouragement and support can be offered to help justice-involved children and young people gain control over the intense reactions, destructive thoughts, and impulsive behaviors that are often associated with experiences of trauma. In this way, case work that is predicated on these ideas avoids what Case (2021) describes as “conceptualising and explaining offending by children as the product of identifiable, quantifiable ‘deficits’ and flaws within the individual that can be targeted, treated and allegedly corrected through youth justice sentences and interventions” (p. 4). Importantly, the back to basics approach also respects the ethical, professional, and practical imperatives for youth justice practitioners to do better in responding to the developmental needs of justice-involved children and young people, especially in relation to the intersection between maltreatment and justice system involvement.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Elizabeth Lyster, Louisa Hackett, and Nesam MacMillan - as well as the anonymous reviewers - for helpful comments during the preparation of this paper.