Communicating Risk in Youth Justice: A Numbers Game

Abstract

We live in a ‘risk society’ characterised by rapid social changes and globalisation (see Beck 1992), which presents the concept of ‘risk’ as universally negative — as a threat or harm to be managed or mitigated, rather than, for example, a positive sensation to be pursued (see Katz 1988; Kemshall 2008). The mass media, politicians, academics, and the general public have conspired to present risk as a social harm, particularly the risk that young people allegedly pose to themselves and others (Haines and Case, in press; Case and Haines 2009; Goldson, in Hendrick 2003). The anxieties of governments in the industrialised Western world over burgeoning rates of crime and antisocial behaviour by young people, the perceived failures of systemic responses to youth crime (e.g. deterrence, community sentences, custody) and the spiralling costs of youth justice (Kemshall 2007) have proved to be a catalyst for Risk Factor Research — a positivist research movement intent on identifying factors in childhood and adolescence that purportedly ‘predict’ or increase the ‘risk’ of offending in later life. Westernised youth/juvenile justice systems have tended towards understandings of offending behaviour by young people that have been framed by a discourse of neo-conservative correctionalism — seeking to ‘correct’ and reduce the ‘problem’ of offending by (adults) targeting perceived deficiencies in the individual (child), including the choice (‘agency’) to offend and/or to not attempt to resist risk, for which the child is held responsible (neo-liberal responsibilisation).