Desistance and children: setting the scene

Since the late 1990s, ‘desistance’ – understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant research focus and ‘increasingly ubiquitous’ in central policy (Maruna and Mann, 2019). Since 2014, with the introduction by the Youth Justice Board of a new assessment framework, desistance thinking has been progressively transplanted to youth justice in England and Wales from the adult justice system. Given that the desistance evidence base is primarily rooted in the experiences of adults who have a history of criminal behaviour, one might have expected this development to have been accompanied by some debate. Yet, discussion or examination of the relevance of desistance thinking to children in the justice system remains scarce, comprising a significant and important gap in scholarship. While there is a limited, albeit developing, international knowledge base about the desistance pathways of children, these studies have typically focused only on children defined as ‘serious’ or ‘persistent’ ‘offenders’. With desistance thinking increasingly applied across the spectrum of youth justice sanctions in England and Wales, it has become necessary to understand, and question, the relevance of desistance thinking with a much broader group of children. This is particularly pressing in light of the growing proportion of out-of-court disposals within youth justice caseloads, which comprise nearly half of supervision cases in some areas. And even among children on court-ordered community sentences, nearly 80 per cent now either have no or a minimal history of recorded offending (Youth Justice Board/MoJ, 2023). How might desistance theories apply given that most children’s offending ‘careers’ are limited to adolescence (Moffitt, 1993) and, thus, desistance is largely normative? Our starting point is that children’s distinct needs, by virtue of their young age and ongoing development, together with their typically normative offending, raise important questions about the relevance and meaning of desistance thinking to their pathways away from crime. In light of this, our core guiding questions are: * What helps children to move away from offending, and in what ways, if at all, does this vary by ethnicity, class and gender? * To what extent is the concept and theorisation of desistance helpful when applied to children or does it, alternatively problematise rather than normalise children’s behaviour? * How is desistance thinking currently understood and implemented in youth justice policy and practice? * What are the implications of the answers to these questions for youth justice theory, research, policy and practice? The collection has been initiated by the National Association for Youth Justice (NAYJ), the only individual charity which campaigns exclusively for the rights of, and justice for, children in trouble with the law. The NAYJ believes that children who come to the attention of criminal justice agencies should be viewed individually according to their stage of development and treated as a child first and foremost (National Association for Youth Justice, 2019). The editors of this collection are all members of the NAYJ’s Board of Trustees. Given that the charity is based in England and Wales, we have not attempted to give the book an international focus. However, it is likely that many of the chapters will be of international interest given that the role of desistance theory within youth justice is not restricted to a single jurisdiction. Given the focus of the NAYJ’s work, our philosophical position that children should be treated as distinct from adults, and the relative dearth of literature specific to desistance and children, the book deliberately, and unapologetically, restricts itself to discussion of individuals in conflict with the law who are under 18. In line with the ethos of the NAYJ, and international standards of children’s rights, we refer throughout to these individuals as children, and the terms ‘youth’, ‘juvenile’ and ‘young offender’ are deliberately eschewed.