Introduction

This chapter begins by exposing the lack of literature that exists relating to youth justice and social media. Current debates about young people, crime and social media are explored and critiqued. Following this, examples of social media in practice are presented. The first provides an example of young people using social media to evade the police and community orders within their local areas, demonstrating the importance of practitioners understanding and keeping pace with how young people use social media. The chapter then explores how social media has been used to enhance youth justice practice. These examples are used to analyse and explore the key issues around young people and social media for youth justice, as well as to develop some concrete recommendations for practitioners for using social media.

Young people's use of online spaces and how these link to antisocial, or even criminal, behaviour is currently a key issue of debate. Media hype and ‘moral panics’ around this currently focus on issues such as cyberbullying, sexting and the exploitation and grooming of young people into radicalised or abusive situations. The suicide of Hannah Smith in 2013 and the links to cyberbullying sparked a media furore (although the 2014 inquest later found she had sent abusive online messages to herself) (see, for example: BBC, 2013; Davies, 2014). The media has also actively engaged in current debates on sexting among young people, reporting on both calls for schools to report perpetrators to police (in particular, where images of young women are shared without consent) and the calls to be wary of criminalising young people around this issue (see, for example: Sawer, 2016).

A dominant media discourse about young people and social media is one of them as vulnerable to exploitation by criminals. The role of social media in the grooming of young people into Islamist radicalisation has received significant media attention, with its use to make contact with, engage and prepare the three young women from Bethnal Green to leave for Syria in 2015 being one of the most high-profile examples of this (see, for example: Khan, 2015). Similarly, the grooming of young people as victims of sexual exploitation has also been a recent media focus (see, for example: Sawer, 2016).