Exploring the criminalisation of children in residential care through the lens of identity disruption
Anne-Marie Day, Neal Hazel, Andrew ClarkPurpose
Care-experienced children are markedly over-represented in youth justice systems internationally. Existing explanations tend to fall into two camps. The first holds that care-experienced children share the same background risk factors as justice-experienced children generally. The second holds that practices within the care environment, such as staff calling the police for behaviour that would be handled informally in a family home, propel children towards criminalisation. This paper offers an original, complementary explanation.
Design/methodology/approach
It draws on semi-structured interviews with 19 care-experienced children in North-West England who were also being supervised by 4 different youth offending teams in the same region. The analysis is informed by attachment theory and by Goffman’s work on stigma and total institutions. It also extends our earlier account of how residential care disrupts children’s identities (Day et al., 2023).
Findings
Drawing on children’s retrospective accounts, we argue that their responses to identity disruption and the ways in which staff and police react to those responses, form an under-recognised part of pathways into the youth justice system, alongside pre-care adversity and staff practice. We conceptualise children’s agency as situated and constrained by pre-care adversity, placement instability, racialisation and adultification, staff practices and policing, rather than as an independent cause of criminalisation. This has implications for how residential care providers, social workers and youth justice practitioners understand and respond to behaviour that is perceived as challenging.
Practical implications
The findings have implications for how residential care providers, social workers and youth justice practitioners understand and respond to behaviour that is perceived as challenging.
Originality/value
The paper’s principal contribution is the identity-disruption response typology, a five-part typology of how children actively respond to stigmatising and depersonalising experiences in residential care. The five responses are reacting to the unfairness of care, reinforcing stigmatised identities, defending pre-care identities, reinforcing pre-care identities and constructing new identities organised around status and protection. The typology connects children’s pre-care experiences, residential-care practices and criminalisation.