New AYJ Podcast launched! The first episode: Harmful Children or Social Harm?
For the first in the AYJ’s podcast series focused on our policy priority 'Reframing Violence', we speak with Luke Billingham and Adam Elliott to explore how society perceives children affected by serious violence, how and why this perception is shaped, and whether this perception is accurate.
The AYJ podcast brings together guests representing our cornerstones of youth voice, research and evidence, and practice expertise, to dig into a range of subjects surrounding children's contact with the youth justice system. Underpinned by our principles of social justice and children's rights, we explore what changes could be made in criminal justice policy and in society as a whole to reimagine justice for children and young people.
When children are involved in violence and offending, the public, media and justice system often focus on the child as a violent or bad person, on the risk the child poses to others, and the harm they have caused and may continue to cause society.
But children are being harmed by austerity, poverty, racial violence and intergenerational trauma, a lack of youth services and support. They are put at risk by a care system in crisis, school environments struggling to meet complex needs, violent policing, and failing responses to exploitation.
Academic and youth worker Luke Billingham and founding member of the Young Advocates for Youth Justice Adam Elliott discuss violence in this context of social harm, highlighting how systems that should support and safeguard children but are instead failing to protect them must be reformed in order to tackle serious violence.
Hear more from our guest speakers:
Learn more about Adam Elliott’s work, as well as the wider research and activities undertaken by the Young Advocates, here.