ABSTRACT
It is a paradox that perhaps the one question in youth justice work that practitioners would deem the most important, how to get young people to participate effectively in youth justice interventions, is the least researched. There has been a great upsurge in publications on youth justice and a significant rise in research projects since 1997 (Phoenix 2009) but there is little in the way of rigorous research findings that enable them to answer the most challenging questions in youth justice. These include: ‘How do I enable young people, usually against their will, to become actively involved in interventions?’ and ‘How do I maintain this involvement and use it to facilitate change in the life of the young person?’ In achieving this, ‘How do I reconcile my potentially contradictory role as an enforcer of a court sentence with my pedagogic responsibilities?’
