The effectiveness of trauma-informed youth justice: a discussion and review

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Catia Malvaso¹  Rhiannon Pilkington²  Carolyn Boyd²  Andrew Day³  Katherine Hawkins⁴ 

[1] School of Psychology and the School of Public Health, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia;School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia;School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia;School of Health Science, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia;South Australian Department of Human Services, Adelaide, SA, Australia;

关键词: youth justice;    trauma informed practice;    indicators;    performance;    measurement;    outcomes;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1157695

 received in 2023-02-02, accepted in 2023-08-21,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Youth justice services around the world are under increasing pressure to find new and more effective ways of working with young people. One way forward is to implement a more compassionate approach to service delivery that embraces the idea of ‘trauma-informed practice’. And yet, substantial variation has been observed in how a trauma-informed approach has been defined and understood by practitioners, with idiosyncratic implementation evident across different systems and only limited evidence that this results in reductions in subsequent re-offending. In this paper we argue that the success of efforts to work in more trauma-informed ways cannot be judged using recidivism data alone and that there is a need to identify key indicators of the effectiveness of any trauma- informed approach. We present the case for implementing trauma-informed youth justice and outline key features of the approach. We then present a logic model that articulates key components and identifies short- and longer-term outcomes that can be measured to assess the overall performance of a service. The article concludes with a discussion of the current evidential status of trauma-informed youth justice, identifying areas of current strength and those where further work is needed to develop the evidence base, including the need to demonstrate the hypothesized association between short-term trauma-informed practice outcomes and the longer-term goal of preventing re-offending.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Day, Malvaso, Boyd, Hawkins and Pilkington.