Diversion from Prosecution (DfP) is growing area of justice practice, yet rarely examined within literature. This paper examines the promises and pitfalls of DfP as a progressive form of justice intervention which, in Scotland at least, has criminal justice practitioners at its heart. This paper will outline how DfP has developed, and provide a critical reading of diversionary practices in Scotland. This will demonstrate that the terminology of diversion encompasses a wide range of provisions and practices, which in turn leads not only to a lack of conceptual clarity, but to interventions which are informed by a number of competing rationales and logics. Despite these tensions, we suggest that DfP in Scotland has many of the hallmarks of socially just and progressive practice, attempting to limit criminalisation and unnecessary contact with formal justice mechanisms, prioritises support needs, offers a rapid and timely intervention and, notably, is available to both criminalised children and adults.

Yet there are a number of potential pitfalls which can arise in the construction and implementation of DfP which may serve to undermine this promise. Specifically we must guard against labelling, net widening and up-tariffing. Similarly, while the “flexibility” of this approach makes it well suited to meeting individual needs, this inevitably creates a risk that professional discretion disadvantages minority groups. This is particularly the case given its relatively informal nature and the competing logics which underpin it. DfP is an approach that challenges traditional concepts of justice and established prosecutorial processes, and thus expansion of such approaches should not go without critique nor debate.

The paper acknowledges significant “blind spots” in terms of our knowledge of how DfP is designed, implemented and experienced by practitioners, criminalised people, and victims. The paper considers how best to respond to this lack of insight.

Commissioned in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, Louise Casey’s (2023) recent review laid bare a series of grave concerns about London Metropolitan Police’s culture and standards. Exposing examples of mistreatment and abuse of LGBT+, female, Black, Asian and minority ethnic officers and staff, alongside repeated unfair outcomes in communities resulting from under-protection and over-policing, Casey concluded that institutional racism, misogyny, and homophobia pervades across the whole organisation. Although the recommendations are for radical reform of the Metropolitan Police, a series of failures have also been identified elsewhere resulting in six UK police forces being placed in special measures. Acknowledging that police legitimacy is under serious threat, policing by consent has once again been identified as fundamental to the success of the British model of policing, while others have called for the police to be defunded.
Drawing on data collected via a survey and focus groups with young people aged between 8-16 years old, attending a community-based programme aimed to engage children in a range of outreach, mentoring, education and diversionary activities, this paper illustrates that dissatisfaction with, and mistrust of, the police are deeply embedded amongst this age group. In contrast, activities and networks based and created within young people’s communities provided (previously absent) opportunities to be safe, protected and among people they trusted. By revealing the value of a community-based provision that encourages social connectedness and develops skills in young people to problem-solve and negotiate conflict, we question our discipline’s (criminology) apparent and continued quest to find a role for the police. Simultaneously, we suggest that the call to ‘defund the police’ may not be the radical alternative that many would have us believe but call also to ‘refund the community’.

Love is not an emotion we associate with professional relationships, particularly not in an involuntary penal context. The child ‘offenders’ in its midst are simultaneously seen as both highly vulnerable and undeserving of compassion. Yet, understood as altruistic love or mutuality in caring, emerging scholarship across social work, youth work, and psychotherapy suggests that such emotions lie at the heart of effective and ethical practice. However, a central observation of this literature is that anxieties about the ‘dark side’ of care, in which it is oppressive and harmful, have meant that emotional closeness in professional – child relationships is seen as inherently suspicious, and thus often silenced and discouraged. In stark contrast to the above fields, 'care' has received scarce attention in the youth justice literature, and mutuality in caring remains even further neglected in the criminological imagination. This paper will present the findings of a 12-month ethnographic study on the contours of ‘care’ and its ethical dimensions in professional relationships in the youth justice realm. The study involves interviews with 20 children and 28 professionals in an English youth justice service, participant observation of practice, case file analysis and participatory work with children. The study applies care ethics, a strand of moral philosophy, which prioritises caring relations and an appreciation of context in decision-making, but simultaneously advocates the ‘moral scrutiny’ and evaluation of ‘care’. It thus offers a useful and novel framework for making sense of caring relations and the complex moral issues that arise in this involuntary youth justice context.

Responses to children and young people who cause harm, to themselves and others, tend to be framed in terms of safety and security. What do we mean when we talk about keeping children safe, and secure, or about public or community safety? What does the language of safety and security do in these different contexts? And what does this have to do with criminology? In this presentation I explore the question: How does criminology as a discipline and practice ‘hold’ children? With attention to the use of language and how taken-for-granted concepts shape practices, I consider how criminalising and carceral responses to children constitute harm and violence. In direct challenge to deficit narratives of ‘risky’ young people, and carceral emphases on physical and procedural security, I imagine safety and security otherwise: in terms of physical, emotional, spiritual, cultural, and relational wellbeing and flourishing. Drawing on First Nations scholarship on relationality and holding – in contrast to the metaphor of the hold – I envisage safety and security in the worlds of children and young people as ontological, relational, intersubjective, and therefore worlding. My aim in to challenge criminology to let go of its hold on children, to set childhood free of criminalising and carceral constraints, and to do so by listening to children and by taking their worlds and their experiences seriously.