Introduction

Despite being a hub of medical and scientific innovation and an economic and political big hitter, the United Kingdom (UK) appears to have fared particularly badly in the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly 8.5 million people testing positive, more than half a million resultant hospital admissions and nearly 161,800 deaths (giving COVID-19 on the death certificate) since it began (UK Government, 2021a). This has meant that for every aspect of life, sweeping changes have been made, backed by legislation, to try to limit damage to public health and enable essential services to continue. Youth justice is one such area. It has seen enormous restrictions imposed on it, but also, consequently, a disproportionately damaging effect on alreadyvulnerable justice-involved children. This chapter explores the effect of these impositions on the youth justice system (YJS) in England and Wales, analyzing the ‘pains’ and ‘gains’ of COVID-19, repurposing Sykes's (1958) ‘pains of imprisonment’ thesis and echoing Bateman's (2020) application of this to the effects of COVID-19 on children in custody, but developing this to apply across the whole gamut of children's justice experience (from pre-court prevention right through to custody and resettlement).

In this chapter, employing the dual lenses of children's rights and ‘Child First’ as the guiding principle for a YJS which (at least in rhetoric) sees children as children (rather than ‘offenders’; cf Case and Browning, 2021), we examine how engagement (both practitioner and system engagement with children and vice versa) has been adversely affected (pains) throughout all levels of involvement from prevention work to custody and resettlement, damaging support to vulnerable children, foregrounding them as offenders and eroding their vital rights as children (as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; United Nations – UN, 1989) to which the UK is a signatory state), and we also consider where there have been gains through rapidly developing practice and innovation. The subthemes of innovation, contact, access, safeguarding and engagement are applied to actions of the courts, community contact with children and the custodial environment.