
Authors Diana F Johns, Kate Williams and Kevin Haines
Published in Youth Justice (2017)
The authors explore literature around the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships in working with young offenders and outline the social-ecological approach needed to achieve this.
The usual approach taken to working with repeat youth offenders tends to focus attention and resources too narrowly on the "problem" areas in children's lives that are seen as directly related to offending. This negative narrative and framing of risk and deficit is "discouraging", focuses and reinforces young people's shortcomings and creates an ethos of suspicion and blame.
An alternative approach is to use the same principles that apply to working with young children when working with young people who are offenders. Such an approach involves building an effective practitioner/young person relationship and using it to support positive development, which is key to effective ways of working with this group. Relationships allow professionals to engage young people and open the door to foster and support motivation to change.
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