Youth Justice News (22.3)

Abstract

The Youth Justice Board for England and Wales was established, by the Crime and Disorder Act 1997, as a non-departmental public body to oversee the operation of the youth justice system. One of the Board’s most significant initiatives was the development, and subsequent national roll-out from April 2000, of a standardised, mandatory, assessment tool, called ASSET, which youth offending teams were obliged to complete for all children subject to court orders or statutory pre-court interventions. ASSET was an actuarial instrument which required practitioners to ascribe scores to individual children across 12 domains of risk. While it also aimed to identify protective factors, the latter were not subject to scoring. Where risks were identified as contributory to the child’s offending behaviour, supervision planning was expected to address those factors. With the onset of, what was known as, the ‘scaled approach’, introduced by the Youth Justice Board in 2009, levels and frequently of interventions were also to be determined by the total ‘risk of reoffending score’ aggregated from the different ASSET domains. The risk factor prevention paradigm, in which ASSET was firmly rooted, was increasingly subject to criticism. At the same time, the growing influence of desistance theory, which focused on the processes through which children give up offending rather than identifying past risks which might help to explain their criminal behaviour, led to a growing recognition that ASSET was unduly deficit focused, limited practitioner discretion and tended to ignore the perspectives of children themselves. The Youth Justice Board accordingly developed a new assessment framework, AssetPlus, which was designed to address some of the criticisms of ASSET. The revised tool was intended to allow risk ‘to be balanced alongside consideration of a young person’s needs, goals and strengths’ and aimed to encourage practitioners to identify