With almost 7.5 thousand views, Child First Justice: The research evidence-base, a report by Professor Stephen Case and Research Associate Ann Browning of the Department of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy, became the 5th most accessed item on the Loughborough University Research Repository in 2025.
Child First is a model of youth justice adopted by the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales in 2019. The report collates, for the first time, the extensive evidence-base that supports Child First as a model of youth justice practice.
Informed by a comprehensive review of international sources of literature, the report documents and showcases evidence of the efficacy of the Child First principle. It outlines the origins of Child First in international children’s rights instruments (e.g. the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989), tracing its evolution and development in scholarship, research and government strategy, leading into its formalisation in the strategy and national standards of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales in 2019.
The Child First principle is unpacked into four ‘tenets’, each of which includes a range of components.
- See children as children: Prioritise the best interests of children, recognising their particular needs, capacities, rights and potential. All work is child-focused, developmentally informed, acknowledges structural barriers and meets responsibilities towards children.
- Develop pro-social identity for positive child outcomes: Promote children’s individual strengths and capacities to develop their pro-social identity for sustainable desistance, leading to safer communities and fewer victims. All work is constructive and future-focused, built on supportive relationships that empower children to fulfil their potential and make positive contributions to society.
- Collaboration with children: Encourage children’s active participation, engagement and wider social inclusion. All work is a meaningful collaboration with children and their carers.
- Promote diversion: Promote a childhood removed from the justice system, using pre-emptive prevention, diversion and minimal intervention. All work minimises criminogenic stigma from contact with the system.
Organised according to these tenets, each of the four report sections collate, discuss and evaluate the principle of Child First in terms of their underpinning theories and their related empirical research evidence-bases from the field of youth justice and associated areas (e.g. childhood and youth studies, policing, social work, health). Case studies and operational examples are integrated throughout to illustrate the research evidence-base in practice. The report brings together longstanding, multi-disciplinary perspectives relating to each of the four tenets to support the Child First model of youth justice.