Risks, Needs and Discrimination: Examining the Fairness of Assessment and Planning Frameworks for Youth Justice Interventions

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The Fellowship aims to contribute to the developing literature on the intersections between youth deviance, parenting and institutional discrimination. Understandings of youth crime as triggered by individual and familial risk factors have anchored themselves in criminological theory and the UK's youth justice practice (Farrington 2003). However, research has exposed the selection effects of institutions that propel young people into the system not only based on the seriousness of their challenging behaviour, but also according to their family's reputation and their social disadvantage (McAra and McVie 2007). As such effects have remained largely unexplored, my doctoral research examined whether practitioners within youth justice, the police, education, early intervention, mental health and the voluntary sector treat young people in trouble with the law and their parents differently according to the family's social status, as well as the impacts of institutional working practices on these processes. I found that interventions with young offenders focus on managing their risks and vulnerabilities, but this kind of treatment might be leading clients of different socioeconomic backgrounds on diverse pathways. During the proposed Fellowship, I will, firstly, develop my doctoral thesis into a monograph, my postdoctoral papers into journal articles, and attend international conferences to disseminate my research findings to fellow academics. To maximise the impact of my doctoral research, I will return to the institutions that participated in my study and present my results to them in the form of a report. I will raise awareness about my findings to the general public by sharing my work on academic platforms, the project's social media account and website. To encourage knowledge exchange, I will organise a one-day symposium that will bring together academics, policy-makers and practitioners within youth justice. In the course of the Fellowship, I will, secondly, advance my teaching and research-related skills. Within Oxford's Law Faculty, I will contribute seminars in the subjects of Youth Justice, Crime and the Family, Qualitative Methods as well as Criminology and Criminal Justice. I will share my findings with early career researchers and senior academics in the fields of criminology, law and socio-legal studies by partaking in workshops and seminar series offered by the Law Faculty. I will also collaborate with researchers from other fields (education, psychiatry, internet studies) as part of the Excluded Lives Project that is examining the practices of school exclusion and the trajectories of children post-exclusion across the UK from a multidisciplinary perspective.Thirdly, I will carry out further limited research based on my doctorate. In my postdoctoral study, I will examine whether, how and why assessing young people's risks and needs when designing youth justice interventions can play out discriminatorily. I will explore the different aspects of discrimination (e.g. according to social class, race, ethnicity, gender, disability) and how they intersect when practitioners employ risk assessment tools. I will conduct my research within one Youth Offending Team (YOT) in Oxfordshire. I have chosen this research site as YOTs provide services to children who offend or are 'at risk' of offending. Furthermore, the daily practices within YOTs are informed by standardised risk assessment guidelines that professionals are required to use. Lastly, I will develop future grant applications with the help of fellow postdoctoral researchers, senior academics, and the Law Faculty's Research Support and Administration Team. I aim to pursue an ESCR New Investigator Grant, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship or a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to examine how specific political, legal and socio-cultural contexts impact upon the fairness of risk assessment within youth justice in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.