Youth Justice: Social Policy, Social Work and Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Reimagining justice for children across youth justice systems internationally.

Focus: Youth justice research and scholarship, particularly the generation of evidence to inform systemic and informal ‘Child First’ and child-friendly practice responses to offending by children.

Scope: Scholarship and applied research conducted internationally (Western and Non-Western world) over the previous decade outside of (before, beyond) and within youth/juvenile justice systems, which have produced evidence-based recommendations for policy and practice focused on child justice.

Purpose: A thorough and multi-faceted examination of the scope, diversity, validity, and utility of research conducted to inform empirical understandings of and policy/practice responses to children’s offending globally and the quality of the methodologies employed and evidence produced by this body of research.

Content will cover (but is not limited to) reimagining and reforming child justice, child policing, child legal processes, child social care, child asylum and immigration, etc. Each article examines the scope for an evidence-based, innovative re-imagination and reform of ‘justice’ for children, prioritising criminal/youth justice, weaving in detail considerations of social, restorative, and distributive justice throughout. Each article will include a 'state of the nation' assessment (always international in scope), as well as detailed critical exploration of theoretical, policy, and practice opportunities for justice reform.  This aims to promote innovative, holistic, and comprehensive foci, which coalesce around reforming conceptions, understandings, and processes of justice for children, thus emphasising (for the first time) constructions of Child Justice as opposed to youth or juvenile justice. The innovative elements of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Examination of understandings and responses to children with a range of vulnerabilities, adverse childhood experiences, and unmet support needs and is situated in multiple contexts (e.g., support systems, sanctioning organisations).
• Engagement with multiple ‘justice’ constructs and discourses: youth and juvenile, criminal (18-25 year olds), restorative, distributive, social.
• Cohering a range of international justice perspectives and lessons for child justice, underpinned and evidenced by research, policy, practice, and lived experience.

Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) of the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Stephen Case
Dr. Kathy Hampson
Dr. Sean Creaney
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• youth justice
• children
• justice
• child first
• social justice
• intervention
• reform
• reimagining
• social work
• policy