Understanding Youth Offending

Book excerpt: This book provides an understanding of youth offending and policy and practice responses that have been underpinned by risk factor research. The arguments set out in this book engage with the purposes, quality and conclusions of risk factor research with young people and the deterministic and prescriptive nature of the risk factor paradigm. This book explores youth justice and youth offending in the context of the original and contemporary manifestations of risk factor research with young people in England and Wales as well as internationally. It analyses the influence of concepts of risk upon policy development in England and Wales, highlighting tensions between the proponents of risk factor research and methodological and ethical criticisms of the risk factor paradigm. Understanding Youth Offending will be essential reading for anybody wishing to understand risk factor explanations of crime, contemporary youth justice policy and responses to offending behaviour.