Reimagining justice: AYJ’s policy influencing priorities for our new strategic period
The AYJ has worked with members, stakeholders and children and young people to identify four priority areas for our policy influencing work across 2023-25: Rethinking policing; Explaining and reforming racial disparities; Ensuring custody is a last resort; and Reframing violence.
While commendable progress has been made in recent years to reduce the number of children entering the justice system and to adopt Child First approaches to youth justice, in developing the new AYJ strategy Reimagining justice for children and young people, we identified three key barriers in desperate need of focus:
The response to children at risk of entering the justice system too often fails to recognise vulnerability and exploitation and prioritise safeguarding
Racial disparities have increased and Black and racially minoritised children continue to experience grave injustices
Children continue to be sent into a harmful and failing secure estate
Punitive attitudes pervade, police officer numbers are on the rise, and children’s unmet welfare needs are increasing. There is a significant risk that without coordinated and concerted action, there will be a surge in criminalisation, racial injustice, and imprisonment of children in coming years. The AYJ is committed to challenging and resisting this by reimagining what justice means for children.
Across autumn 2022, we held four scoping sessions with members, wider stakeholders and the Young Advocates, to shed light on pressing issues across the three areas above, and identify activities in the sector, gaps in evidence, and influencing opportunities. These sessions have informed the development of a plan of action for research activities and influencing work for 2023-25. We have identified four priorities for our policy work:
Rethinking policing
The police are a crucial gateway to the youth justice system. How they interact with children and respond to their behaviour is critical, but child-centred standards for policing are far from being realised, and children are being actively harmed as a result. Thousands more police officers on the streets at a time where children are increasingly vulnerable and unsupported creates huge risks.
Work must be done now to rethink policing, ensuring the priority for all police is safeguarding and supporting children, rebuilding relationships, rectifying the use of disproportionate police powers, and addressing discriminatory and escalatory police behaviour.
Explain and reform racial disparities
Racial disparities cumulate at every stage of a child’s pathway into the youth justice system. From marginalisation and exclusion before system contact, to overpolicing, lack of access to diversion and support, and harsher sentencing and remand.
Despite recognising the increasing racial inequalities in youth justice, the government sidesteps the issue and agencies pass the buck. The Lammy Review requirement to ‘explain or reform’ racial disparities must be embodied. By identifying sources and solutions, agencies at each stage must be held accountable for their role in contributing to inequalities in youth justice, and actions taken to address it.
Ensuring custody is a last resort
Alarm bells are ringing about how a secure estate already on its knees will cope if the number of children in custody increases as predicted. Custody is already not used as a last resort, nor for the shortest appropriate time. The government must do everything in its power to ensure this, yet new laws and a lack of vision show we are moving in the opposite direction.
The government must be held accountable for failing to minimise the use of custody. Policy and practice that sees children unnecessarily subjected to the harms of the secure estate must be reformed.
Reframing violence
Children involved in serious violence are particularly vulnerable, often face multiple disadvantage, and are frequently victims of crime, violence, and exploitation. Yet the response to violence often fails to recognise this, and misrepresentations drive overly punitive responses.
Violence involving children must be understood in its context: one of social harms, state failure, and structural violence. Narratives need to be reframed away from ‘youth violence’ and ‘risky’, ‘harmful’ children, towards an understanding of the societal violence, risks and harms children are subjected to, that may sweep them into the justice system. Agencies must understand that youth justice is everyone’s responsibility.
Next steps
We’re looking forward to working with our members and children and young people over the coming months and years to reimagine justice for children, taking steps to achieve our long-term ambitions for change:
The criminalisation of children is reduced. The policing response recognises vulnerability and victimisation, and prioritises the safeguarding of children’s rights, health, and wellbeing
Unjust racial disproportionality in the criminalisation, sentencing and imprisonment of children is evidenced, acknowledged, and action is taken to address it. Experiences and outcomes for children across the youth justice system are more equitable.
Custody is used as a last resort for children in England and Wales, and for the shortest appropriate period of time.
The response to violence affecting children prioritises safeguarding and support over marginalisation and criminalisation.