ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores ideas of crime, justice and childhood, and explores the connections between these and draws out the potential implications for diversionary practice. It explores the translation of changing ideas about childhood into the specific context of the emergence of modern policing and the changing shape of practice in relation to young people's offending. The book then focuses on apparent periodisation of diversion in youth justice, with the emergence of substantial criticism of its impact with linked evidence indicating a significant 'net-widening' effect. It also provides an account of effects of 'back to justice' movement of 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 lives of children and families.
