ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the accounts of practitioners, young people, and their parents to explore the ways in which professional perceptions and responses to youth in trouble are impacted by broader institutional discourses. It examines how the rhetoric of managing young people’s risk and needs to prevent their offending behaviour might shape institutional selection effects according to class. The chapter argues that an entrenched risk paradigm within the current youth justice setting may bolster a socially decontextualised perception of young offenders and their parents. The chapter also suggests that professional viewpoints that are less conscious about the impacts of structural hardship on family life and children’s behaviour might be reinforced by an economic conception of time that has invaded welfare-oriented services. An understanding that time passes linearly and in the same way for families across class backgrounds is unattuned to the zig-zag lifeworlds of disadvantaged children and their parents, possibly impeding their gradual desistance processes when applied in interventions. The chapter concludes by exposing some of the practical constraints that the interviewees exposed as negatively affecting the reflexivity of professionals helping families on the ground, including the bureaucratisation of services, targeted interventions, decreases in discretion, and a drop in professionalism.
