Absence of Responses to School Absence: The Links between School Absenteeism, Institutional Neglect, and Delinquency

• In Event: Schools, Peers and Delinquency

Abstract

School exclusion has been recognised as a risk factor in the development of youth offending. The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ symbolises a fast-track trajectory driven by punitive responses to some young people’s transgressions and their exclusion from school. However, we know little about how schools deal with or ignore school absenteeism, children’s vulnerabilities that trigger it, and their links to the development of youth offending behaviour. The lack of data on absenteeism is unsatisfactory since where data on absence from school exists, the scale of persistent absence compared to exclusion is shocking. Why school absenteeism remains a relatively invisible problem is unknown, with little investment in addressing the causes and finding effective strategies. This paper builds on a qualitative analysis of 150 prosecutorial and 170 judicial case files in youth justice cases in Slovenia to examine how many young people in trouble with the law were persistently absent from school and why. It categorises the reasons for school absences and considers what they tell us about the schools’ inability or unwillingness to recognise children’s needs or vulnerabilities. It then conceptualises ignored school absenteeism – combined with youth justice responses - as one of the broader processes of social exclusion for some children and their families. It identifies correlations between children’s gender, nationality, disability, and substance abuse on one side, and absence from school, on the other, to rethink the meaning and routes of penality considering young people in Slovenia, a jurisdiction with a generally inclusive educational and welfare-oriented youth justice system. The paper uses the results to suggest how institutional discourses and working practices in education and youth justice could change to minimise the adverse effects of structural and individual harm linked to both absences from school and youth offending behaviour.

Author

• Jasmina Arnež, Institute of Criminology, University of Ljubljana and Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford