ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of the effects of the 'back to justice' movement of the early 1980s, and of a much better informed body of agencies and practitioners whose approach was grounded in principles of minimum intervention and offence-based problem solving, supported by a wider strategy of reducing the size and scope of state involvement in the lives of children and families. The arguments for change which emerged at around the beginning of the 1980s and were consolidated thereafter stemmed from a belief that the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 had been critically flawed in two respects. By 1980, there was evidence of a new emergent consensus, which appeared to span the political spectrum. Frustration with the ineffectiveness of existing interventions, coupled with the harms associated with institutionalisation, concerns over the erosion of the rule of law, a changing political climate and financial constraints all seemed to point in the same direction.
