Contextualising Youth Justice Interventions: Making the Case for Realist Synthesis

Abstract

This article examines the problematic reductionism and decontextualising nature of hegemonic youth justice intervention evaluation and offers a way ahead for a realistic, context‐sensitive approach to intervention evaluation in the youth justice field. It opens by considering how the development of risk‐based youth justice interventions in England and Wales flowed from and fed into the modernisation and resultant partiality of the ‘evidence‐base’, which shaped youth justice practice. It then moves to a critical review of the emergence and continued influence of risk‐based interventions and the ‘What Works’ intervention evaluation framework in youth justice. In the closing discussion, this article envisages the potential of taking a realist approach to the evaluation of youth justice interventions to mitigate the limitations of current approaches to intervention selection and the evaluation of their ‘effectiveness’.