Abstract
This edited text explores, analyses and evaluates ‘Child First’—a guiding principle and strategy for understanding children who offend and for sha** youth justice responses to this offending. Child First transcends traditional welfare and justice priorities and more contemporary risk management and hybrid models of youth justice to offer a progressive, child-friendly, non-criminalising r/evolution in youth justice. The Child First principle and its component tenets (seeing children as children, develo** pro-social identity for positive outcomes, collaboration with children, diversion) have the potential to significantly develop and enhance understandings of, and responses to, offending by children in conceptual, theoretical, policy and practical terms.
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Notes
- 1.
Understood here as a complex social construction that can be broadly operationalised as the structures, systems, processes, frameworks, strategies, policies, organisations, principles and theories underpinning responses to offending by ‘children’ and ‘young people’ in particular jurisdictions at a given point in time (cf. Case, 2021).
- 2.
Indeed, this progressive philosophy could be applied equally to the treatment of children in trouble by related support systems including policing, social care, education, health and youth work.
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Case, S., Hazel, N. (2023). Introduction. In: Case, S., Hazel, N. (eds) Child First. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19272-2_1
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