With the growth in the use of restorative justice and restorative approaches, this book takes an in-depth look at their applicability in the environment of children's residential care homes.
This book is designed to help you navigate the challenges and joys of building and maintaining a healthy restorative ecosystem in your school, while providing concrete tools and real-world stories to guide you through the process. Traditional methods of discipline are commonly found to be ineffective, and this book shows how restorative justice can benefit schools in a huge variety of ways, such as decreasing the need for suspensions, increasing academic outcomes, and improving the health of your whole school community. Written by the founder and the education director of the National Center for Restorative Justice, each and every chapter is packed with expertise on everything from carrying out the stages of a restorative circle to understanding the importance of conflict. The authors pull no punches in showing that this work is not always easy, but their passion for restorative justice shines out of every page, demonstrating just how valuable this approach can be in bringing the absolute best out of your students and school.
Restorative justice is an innovative approach to addressing conflict and bullying, as well as disruptive, challenging and criminal behaviour. A restorative approach in a care setting shifts the emphasis from managing and responding to anti-social behaviour to the building, nurturing and repairing of relationships, and encourages the young person to accept responsibility and put things right. In this photocopiable resource, Belinda Hopkins identifies the practical benefits of employing the restorative approach. In extreme cases, this can mean dealing with serious incidents effectively without recourse to the police and the criminal justice system. For day-to-day interactions the approach builds on the principles of social pedagogy and 'restorative parenting', and offers a fresh look at encouraging self-regulation through the promotion of pro-social behaviour and greater involvement of the young people themselves in making choices that address everyone's needs. Just Care is essential reading for residential care managers and staff, social workers, youth offending team managers and those with responsibility for foster care training and development.
This book on Restorative Discipline Practices (RDP) will provide anecdotes and process stories by authors from diverse backgrounds including: classroom teachers, school administrators, campus coordinators, juvenile justice officials, community leaders and university professors.It will be an inspiration and reference for educators as they begin or continue to implement RDP in the schools.
"Crossover" Children in the Youth Justice and Child Protection Systems explores the outcomes faced by the group of children who experience involvement with both child protection and youth justice systems across several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Situated against a backdrop of international evidence and grounded in a two-year study with the Children’s Court in Victoria, Australia, this book presents a cohesive picture of the backgrounds, characteristics, and pathways traversed by crossover children. It presents statistical data from 300 crossover Children’s Court case files, alongside the expert evidence of 82 professionals, to generate a comprehensive picture of the lives of crossover children, and the individual and systemic challenges that they face. The book investigates the crucial question of why some children involved with child welfare systems experience particularly poor criminal justice outcomes, demonstrating how the convergence of cumulative childhood adversity, complex support needs, and systemic disadvantage produces acutely damaging outcomes for some crossover youth. It outlines the implications of the study, including how these findings might shape diversion and differential justice system responses to child protection-involved youth, and the innovative approaches adopted internationally to avert the care to custody pathway. This book is internationally relevant and will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and law, social work, psychology, and sociology, as well as legal, welfare, and government agencies and policy developers, non-government peak bodies and services, professional probation services, case managers, health and mental health services, disability and drug treatment agencies, and others who work with both young offenders and the design and implementation of policy and legislation.
Drawing on recent international developments in criminal justice, Restorative Approaches to Conflict in Schools highlights the long-term ineffectiveness of punitive models of discipline in education contexts and examines an alternative approach, underpinned by the principles of restorative justice. This approach provides an opportunity for adults and young people to engage with a range of processes such as group conferencing and peer mediation, whereby: conflict and harm are confronted and repaired; a future rather than past orientation is developed; relationships are built upon the values and attitudes of respect, inclusion and equality; pupils learn inter-personal and problem solving skills as well as social responsibility; staff develop skills and confidence in working restoratively; the risk of future/repeat problems is minimised; and a positive school ethos is developed. These approaches have proven to be highly effective in criminal justice systems around the world, and are beginning to be applied more widely in educational contexts. This edited volume draws together for the first time contributions from an interdisciplinary field of international experts and practitioners on the subject, and offers both critique and guidance in order that the implementation of restorative approaches in schools may be undertaken thoughtfully and sustainably. This exciting new text will be a key reference book for locating contemporary, international and inter-disciplinary debate in the field.
Author Patricia Wilcox has written the essential guide to trauma informed care with at risk youth. Wilcox provides a foundational understanding of trauma s impact on the developing brain, then details its implications for treatment, the promotion of pro-social behaviors, and improving the culture among clients and staff. Incorporating the key concepts of compassionate understanding, validation, skill teaching, and the primacy of trustworthy relationships for healing trauma and rebuilding connections in the child s brain, Wilcox tackles some of the most difficult challenges in treatment settings with practical approaches grounded in theory and research. This book is an invaluable resource for parents, social workers, childcare staff, therapists, agency administrators, and anyone who cares about how kids are treated when they need skillful, trauma-informed care.
Kids who understand how to manage conflict successfully can transform their schools into safer and kinder places to learn. Kids Working It Out offers educators and parents a guide to the most current and effective school-based conflict resolution programs and shows how these programs can make a positive difference in our schools. Throughout the book, students and teachers share their stories of what it's really like in today's schools and reveal how Conflict Resolution Education, has shaped their experiences. Kids Working It Out covers a wide range of topics-- curriculum integration, peer mediation, restorative justice, and others-- and shows what it takes to implement an effective program in any school, and any community.
The Criminalisation and Exploitation of Children in Care explores the results of a recent qualitative study, which focused on multi-agency responses to children and young people in residential and foster care who were at risk of criminalisation and/or exploitation and abuse. Recent high-profile reports have highlighted an urgent need for effective multi-agency work to tackle the issues of criminalisation and exploitation of children and young people in care. However, progress to date has been slow, and it is clear that there is still some way to go before effective multi-agency working becomes widespread. In response, this book draws upon the experiences and perspectives of practitioners from a sample of co-located Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs, as well as the latest research, theory and policy developments in the field. In doing so, it explores both the benefits and challenges of multi-agency working and concludes with recommendations for future policy and practice. This timely study will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, policing studies, social work, health and childhood studies. It will also be a valuable tool for practitioners and policymakers in the criminal, youth justice and social service arenas.