‘Dancing Around the Issue’: Discourse on Youth Crime and Paradoxes of Youth Justice in Ghana

• In Event: The Treatment of Young People in the Criminal Justice System: A Synthesis of Local Perspectives

Abstract

The problem of youth crime and response to young people’s antisocial behaviour in Ghana has remained a particularly challenging issue for government and youth justice practitioners. This challenge, in part, may be traced to colonial influences and contemporary global youth justice philosophies and policies that in some ways appear inconsistent with indigenous conceptions of the child and cultural responses to youth problem behaviour. This paper aims to review the history of youth justice in Ghana. Beginning from the pre-colonial period, the paper examines the underlying philosophy that has guided response to young people who engage in antisocial behaviour, the pattern and changes that has occurred over the years in terms of policy and law and how these changes have been influenced by internal and external dynamics and debates. Ways in which these changing patterns has promoted or undermined the welfare of problem children in Ghana are also examined.

Author

• Kofi Boakye, Anglia Ruskin University