Transcript

Professor John Muncie

Another core problem with the risk factor paradigm is that it tends to present risks as individualised and also as if they [comprise] uncontroversial facts and truths. What is being revealed is correlations rather than causes. There is a question of whether we can reduce the complex lives of young offenders down to a limited and prescribed menu of factors, again derived from this research, which emanates initially from a fairly narrow psychosocial focus. Such studies tell us what factors are linked to offending, or offending that we know about, but not how and why such factors might actually be linked.What’s also missing, I think, from statistical and quantitative data, which the risk factor analysis is based on, is perceptions about notions of risk from young people themselves or from the practitioners within the youth justice system, which may be completely at odds with what seems to be indicated by quantitative research. So, in other words, it generalises probabilities to specific individuals and, as I’ve said, it may create a high number of false positives: in other words mislabelling and inaccurately identifying particular individuals who are believed to pose a risk in the future. And that then may lead to unwarranted degrees of intrusive intervention in their immediate and in their future lives.