Responding to Juvenile Crime through the Lens of the ‘Problem Family’

• In Event: Institutional Responses to Troubled and/or Marginalized Young People and their Families

Abstract

This paper explores the ‘problem family’ and its place in criminal justice policy. Constructing the ‘problem family’ as a social problem requiring government intervention has a long history stretching back over 100 years, but has been particularly prominent in various forms in the last two decades. Blame has been leveled at families - and particularly parents - for crime and anti-social behaviour and a raft of measures have been introduced to try to address these problems. Evidence for the success of measures introduced to target these families is rather mixed, and these measures have an unequal impact on women from lower socio-economic groups. The most recent incarnation in the UK is the government’s Troubled Families programme, developed in the wake of the London Riots in 2011 to explicitly address what was seen to be a problem of poor parenting alongside other ‘complex needs’ including truanting, unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour. Although the term ‘troubled’ suggests that families may be victims of social or economic difficulties, the government rhetoric continues to locate responsibility within individual families. The paper interrogates the assumptions underlying the notion of the 'problem family' and the responses that have evolved to address youth crime through this lens.

Authors

• Caroline Miles, University of Manchester

• Rachel Condry, University of Oxford