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Since 2015, the authors of this chapter have been working together through a formal partnership between Manchester Metropolitan University and the 10 youth offending teams (YOTs) in the Greater Manchester region of north west England. ¹ This partnership, termed the Greater Manchester Youth Justice University Partnership (GMYJUP), is the first of its kind in a youth justice context. GMYJUP has predominately focused on strengthening justice-involved children's participation in decision-making processes and embedding meaningful participation in youth justice service delivery and practice (Smithson et al., 2020; Smithson & Gray, 2021; Smithson & Jones, 2021). In this chapter, the authors outline the Child-First narrative that is becoming increasingly apparent in the youth justice system in England and Wales, before describing our own body of participatory work which has resulted in the co-creation (with justice-involved children) of a transformative framework of practice that we term Participatory Youth Practice (hereafter referred to as PYP). The chapter goes on to provide a candid account of the facilitators and barriers that youth justice practitioners have encountered when endeavouring to embed PYP into existing youth justice processes. The authors conclude with a consideration of the value of child-centred practice for children and practitioners.

The primary goal of the Restorative Justice process is not punishment but making good the harm done by offending for the victim, the community and the offender. Offenders have to take responsibility for their actions as a precondition to addressing the harm that they have caused. Offenders become aware that a crime is committed, not against an abstraction, but against someone real, a person like themselves and against their community, who are directly and indirectly affected by what has happened. Crime and conflict affect relationships between individuals who are left outside the court system altogether by conventional justice. Proceedings and arguments of the restorative process are voluntary for all parties. People are given the opportunity to partake in mediation, or to accept reparation. The process is always confidential however; outcomes and agreements can be made public, depending on the authorisation by participants.

Mothers – The Silent supporters focus on the potential role of the mother in the restorative justice (RJ) process. This chapter provides a contextual framework for the research highlighting debates pertaining to RJ and parents, especially mothers. This was made possible with a grant from the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants. The research provided a holistic understanding of social backgrounds and links between theory and the practice of RJ. The workshop provided a multi-perspective analysis of the interactions within significant relationships between mothers and sons. The author’s focus was on the role of the mother prior to the RJ process. The workshops were held in a safe space in a northern region. The mothers were from different economic and social backgrounds.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

This chapter reports an institutional ethnography (IE) which seeks to explicate the everyday experiences of learning mentors (LMs), introduced into English secondary schools 15 years ago. Within the context of the New Labour (NL) policy agenda characterized by an analysis of the relationship between “risk” and “social exclusion” as the root cause of many social problems, LMs were part of a transformative agenda which elevated ‘low level’ workers to paraprofessional status across a range of public services. The official narrative embedded in policy documents talked of LMs “raising achievement” by “removing barriers to learning,” but this tells us little about the way in which such texts are mediated in the sites where they were enacted. The starting point of the IE was to establish how the work of learning mentors was practiced, viewed, and understood within the school by all parties. The enquiry did not start with pre-existing conceptualizations of “pastoral care” or “disaffected youth” but tracing the genealogy of LM practice became more significant as the research developed, thus attention was paid to the legacy of the US tradition of mentoring and how that was re-imagined in the ruling texts of NL policy. The problematic of the study that emerged was that although warmly received by pupils, LM practices were marginalized, misunderstood, and relatively unseen, casting doubt on the influence suggested in formal prescriptions and giving rise to wider questions regarding the increasingly liminal nature of work undertaken by people working in similar roles in other institutions.