Background

This Research Priority Network, funded by the ESRC (£1.4 million over 4 years), is led by the University of Sheffield and brings together a partnership between 5 UK universities, national and local policy-makers and practitioners and international partners in Australia and the USA.

The Network has three core aims:

• To expand our understanding and knowledge of the relationship between risk factors and the children and young people's pathways into and out of crime;
• To gain a fuller understanding of how children and young people who are identified as being 'at risk' of being future offenders negotiate pathways into and out of crime;
• To understand the social processes of protection, resilience and resistance that mediates between risk factors and pathways into and out of crime.

The Network will extend existing understandings of risk factors in relation to young people's pathways into and out crime through five longitudinal research projects. These projects will challenge existing conceptualisations of 'risk' by emphasising the voices of young people and their families and focusing upon the social and cultural construction of risk and protection in the lives of children and young people with different life-experiences. The Network provides opportunities for the re-theorising of those diverse experiences in an interactive way between researchers, policymakers and young people.

Risk and Protection:

Over the past five years interest has grown among researchers, policy makers and practitioners in the development of preventative approaches with children and families that aim to reduce future levels of crime. The new initiatives that have arisen from this work have been designed to identify those 'at risk' and develop interventions that reduce risk and increase protection. Underpinning these initiatives is research that suggests that there are a number of risk factors that can be identified at an early stage in a child's life, including poverty, poor housing, poor parenting, poor school performance, persistent truancy, low levels of intelligence, being brought up with a criminal parent and association with delinquent peers (Farrington, 1996; Graham, 1998). It is also clear, however, that one cannot 'read off' offending behaviour from these risk factors.

Staff contacts - background - the research programme - ethical statement