The opening chapters have established a pressing need for an alternative, positive model of youth justice to counter the offender first excesses of traditional approaches to working with children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system. The modern context of youth justice is one rife with paradox in its negative views of children as: responsible for their (offending) behaviour, yet not responsible or capable to change their behaviour and circumstances without formal intervention from adults; in need of protection from harm and risk, yet posing harm and risk to a society which must be protected from them; and active beneficiaries of universal, unconditional rights, yet rights that can be withdrawn once the child enters the formal youth justice system (YJS). We have outlined how the ‘new youth justice’ of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 has portrayed offending by children as the deterministic result of exposure to psychosocial risk factors and has individualised the blame for this exposure and subsequent offending, responsibilising children and their families to resist risk factors and to desist from offending by engaging and complying with enforced, adult-led, offence- and offender-focused interventions.

In Chapter One, we made a case for a positive model of youth justice, Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS), which subverts the current dominant, deterministic view of children who offend and likewise the appropriate ways of responding to these children, their behaviour and their lives. CFOS provides a modern paradigm that views children as active constructors of their experiences, circumstances, context and behaviours, but often with their ability to influence outcomes being restricted by entrenched socio-structural inequalities and adult-centric decision making guided by managerialist processes and negative, offender-first perspectives of the child. The model is underpinned by the notion of children's rights as a progressive social norm, extending this principle beyond the need for adults to provide children with minimum standards of service to meet their rights (in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (UNCRC)) and into an entitlements-focused pursuit of maximum outcomes for children through child-friendly and child-appropriate service provision and intervention guided by a view of offending as a normalised childhood behaviour.