Age 10 years | Age 12 years | Age 13 years | Age 14 years | Age 15 years | Age 16 years | Age 18 years |
Age 10 years | Age 12 years | Age 13 years | Age 14 years | Age 15 years | Age 16 years | Age 18 years |
France |
The pathways into crime and offending are different for girls and young women compared to young men. It is often focused around close personal relationships and strongly associated with experiences of loss, bereavement, abuse and local authority children’s services. Young women’s problematic behaviour is often made worse by criminal justice interventions, and while the same holds for young men, the association is much stronger for girls and young women. The capacity of girls and young women to maintain positive relationships is seriously damaged by custodial sentences. Vulnerability and mental health difficulties make prison life particularly difficult and damaging for girls and young women. Compared to boys, they are three times more likely to have been victims of sexual abuse and twice as likely to have spent time in local authority care prior to incarceration. Girls and young women need an interpersonal focus to make their resettlement after custody effective. The obstacles to desistance (stopping offending) for girls and young women are different compared to those for boys and young men. (Beyond Youth Custody, 2014)
Black Caribbean pupils are more than three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the school population as a whole; those who identify as Black or Black British are four times more likely to be stopped by the police than their white counterparts; and in 2016 for young people aged between 16 and 24 years, the White ethnic group had the lowest unemployment rate of 12 per cent, a figure which more than doubles when it comes to youth of Black (25 per cent) and Bangladeshi/Pakistani (28 per cent) backgrounds respectively. What these figures, and many more besides impart, is that while race may be a discredited concept it still structures society. (Nayak, 2018)
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; … or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. (Du Bois, 1903)