ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the research participants’ accounts to understand the precise mechanisms behind classed distortions in professional perceptions and decisions about young people’s offending behaviour and their parents’ childrearing. It combines Bourdieu’s notion of habitus with Sayer’s moral understanding of class and Boltanski and Thévenot’s notion of lay normativity to explain how and why children and their parents may be unwittingly treated unfairly according to class in professional interactions within youth justice even when practitioners are generally reflexive about class-related issues. The chapter suggests that every professional decision is an assessment of some sort of worth, but distortions in negotiations can occur if worth is evaluated based on principles that derive from different spheres and such tensions are not discussed and resolved but remain silenced and/or sidelined. The chapter implies that in a social world imbued with class contempt, evaluations of worth are more likely to be class-biased, as individuals and their habits are often overvalued when associated with the dominant and devalued when related to the disadvantaged. In the last part, the chapter uses the same analytical framework to explain potential cases of positive discrimination when practitioners interact with families in an agency setting.
