This book is about society and the way it treats its children – particularly those who come into conflict with the law and the youth justice system. We intend to use the term ‘children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system’ throughout the book, for a number of reasons. Crucially, we have chosen to privilege the terms ‘child’ and ‘children’ over ‘youth’ and ‘young people’, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (UNCRC) designation of a child as anyone under the age of 18 years (fitting with the 10–17-years-age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales) and its requirements for adults to offer children protection, provision and participation in accordance with their status as a ‘child’. We see the law and the youth justice system (in both their shared and distinctive manifestations) as social constructs that reflect the (unequal) distribution of power in society. We see the term ‘offender’ as an expression of that unequal power distribution and as a label used to other children in justification of state intervention in their lives (see Kelly 2012). We see this intervention as all too frequently negative, repressive and punitive, and as frequently having (as evidence shows) negative consequences (albeit sometimes unintended) for the current and future lives of children.

Already, this argument raises a problematic issue – one that is central to this book and to the arguments that we will be making. While we do not see children as being separate from society, we also wish to argue that children have a special place in society and are deserving of special treatment befitting their lack of maturity, their relative powerlessness in society (compared to adults) and their need for adults to provide them with support and protection (see also Harding and Becroft 2013). Special treatment should apply to all children, including those who come into conflict with the law and the youth justice system. The nature of this special treatment, however, is absolutely crucial. Children have been subject to a process of ‘othering’ by youth justice policy and practice in successive decades (see Howe and Strauss 1992), whereby as a relatively powerless sub-group within society, they have been marked out and identified for special treatment by more powerful and dominant social groups, such as adult politicians, officials, professionals in and around the youth justice system (JYS).