Caroline Lanskey

Children with social and health-related disadvantages are over-represented in youth justice systems in many countries. This phenomenon cannot be explained by offending rates alone; rather, a wide body of research suggests that inequalities in youth justice decision-making play a significant role. With reference to Van den Brink and Lanskey’s seven spheres framework and drawing on qualitative analysis of data from decision-makers in youth justice and related services in England & Wales and the Netherlands, we discuss influences common to both systems which were identified as fuelling inequalities in youth justice decision-making and which may have wider relevance.

Studies of youth offending have mostly been conducted within urban settings and have focused predominantly on individualised accounts of offending behaviour. Findings from sociological research on young people’s experiences of rurality have not been fully considered in criminological theorising of youth crime or youth justice practice. In order to address the limited understanding of ‘the rural’ in youth offending and youth justice, this small-scale qualitative study explored young people’s experiences of crime and the Youth Justice System (YJS) in one rural setting in England. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people serving a youth community sentence in this setting. Our thematic analysis revealed the dualities of young people’s experiences of rurality. First, rural spaces were perceived as both a place of sanctuary and respite and of isolation and restriction and second rural spaces provided young people with an opportunity to fly under the radar but they could equally feel hyper-visible. The findings provide an insight into how young people’s needs and development are influenced by rurality and their experiences of the YJS in a rural setting. The findings call for the distinct needs of young people within the YJS in rural settings to be better understood and for concerted efforts to be undertaken to support these young people in their desistance journeys.

Retaining participants in longitudinal studies is important but challenging when retracing them after a substantial gap between study phases. Utilising our nine year mixed-methods longitudinal study of 54 families affected by paternal imprisonment, we qualitatively analysed our processes and experiences of retracing participants after a seven year gap in contact. Paying attention to the spatio-temporal features that are traditionally an analytical focus of qualitative longitudinal research helped to enhance our retention rates, and our fieldwork strategies can be more deeply understood as part of the ‘timescape’ of qualitative longitudinal research. In this paper, we describe the spatio-temporal contours that shaped our efforts, successes and failures, and distil the material practices that they led to during our ‘tracking treks’ through the timescape of longitudinal fieldwork.

This article advances research on the practice of youth justice in rural contexts. Drawing on Ingold’s dwelling perspective, and empirical research with youth justice practitioners in rural England, we explore how practitioners develop their practice through their relationships to their rural working environments. We find that through these relationships, practitioners develop themselves as ‘connectors’, aiming to reduce the impact of Fordshire’s remoteness and isolation on young people; as ‘horizon stretchers’, seeking to raise aspirations and broaden imaginations; but often find themselves to be ‘outsiders’ in relation to rural communities. Accordingly, we argue that youth justice work is infused with the lived realities of the contexts in which it is practised and that ongoing debates over the localization of youth justice must take this into account.