Gendered Pathways to Justice Contact: Young People in the Justice System in Northern Ireland

• In Event: Gender and parenting as sites of juvenile justice intervention

Abstract

Despite increasing scholarly attention towards youth offending, the empirical focus has largely been synonymous with male children (Arnull et al., 2023). This is despite observed changes in the offending patterns of girls over the previous two decades, and a rise in the number of girls in the justice system (Zahn et al., 2009). Traditional criminological research, however, has not devoted sufficient attention to these changes, nor to the gendered experiences, pathways, and trajectories of justice-involved girls (Pasko and Chesney-Lind, 2016). Thus, research focusing on the needs of girls and their pathways into contact with the justice system, and specifically how they may differ from those of boys, remains an understudied area.
Furthermore, much extant research with girls in conflict with the law consists of either solely a focus on girls, and/or consists of retrospective accounts from adults (Shepherd et al., 2019). This paper thus fills a research gap by reporting on contemporaneous accounts from boys, girls, and transgender young people, aged 14 to 19, in contact with the Youth Justice Agency (YJA) in Northern Ireland (NI). Collecting data from more than just girls facilitate comparison and allows for an analysis of what needs and pathways appear to be gender-neutral, and which may be gender-specific. Moreover, a substantial portion of existing scholarship published in English emanates from the United States, necessitating further research in different (smaller) contexts, for example, NI. This qualitative, empirical paper presents a thematic analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with young people from December 2024 to February 2025. Whilst preliminary analysis indicates that there is considerable overlap in needs and pathways for both boys and girls, this paper argues that there are factors specific to each where tailored support would be of significant benefit to these cohorts in terms of desistance and harm reduction.

Authors

• Orlaith Rice, University of Limerick

• Colm Walsh, Queen's University Belfast

• Megan Kelly, Queen's University Belfast