Now in its fourth edition, Youth in Conflict with the Law provides a thorough background on the social development of children and youth and the legal responses to young persons who are involved with crime in Canada. While maintaining the sharp focus and the discussion-provoking features that made earlier editions so popular, authors Denise Whitehead and Mark D. Hunter guide students through the important distinction between punishment and a restorative justice approach—a crucial understanding for those who are the first point of contact with youth. Highlighting the important role of police involvement from first contact to youth justice court, this new edition delves deeply into current issues relating to race and ethnicity, mental health, and the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the important intersection between youth criminal justice and child and family services. New to this edition are updated statistics on youth crime and references to current youth criminal legislation. Featuring informative sidebars, real case briefs, and “In the News” sections, and accompanied by an updated instructor’s guide, this accessibly written text is an excellent resource for students in police foundations programs and training courses.

"Dealing with young people who come into conflict with the law is one of the most important parts of being a police officer. Now in its fourth edition, Youth in Conflict with the Law provides up-to-date analysis on how police handle young persons, while focusing on new and updated legislation, such as the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, and the Child, Youth and Family Services Act. The authors include new material on issues of race, the Black Lives Matter movement, mental health, ethnicity, and social media. The book encourages students to consider the problem of youth crime within social contexts, and to recognize the facts that lead youth to enter into conflict with the law. This resource is ideal for college police foundations students across Canada."--

Children's rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the field's core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children's rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world's population and every human being's first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) signalled a definitive shift in the way that children are viewed and understood--from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children's rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached a state in the evolution of children's rights in which we need more critical evaluation and assessment of the CRC and the large body of children's rights law and policy that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children's rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children's rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children's rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children's rights law.

In Youth and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Agents of Change, Stephanie Schwartz goes beyond these highly publicized cases and examines the roles of the broader youth population in post-conflict scenarios, taking on the complex task of distinguishing between the legal and societal labels of "child," "youth," and "adult."

Urban schools are often associated with violence, chaos, and youth aggression. But is this reputation really the whole picture? In Navigating Conflict, Calvin Morrill and Michael Musheno challenge the violence-centered conventional wisdom of urban youth studies, revealing instead the social ingenuity with which teens informally and peacefully navigate strife-ridden peer trouble. Taking as their focus a multi-ethnic, high-poverty school in the American southwest, the authors complicate our vision of urban youth, along the way revealing the resilience of students in the face of carceral disciplinary tactics. Grounded in sixteen years of ethnographic fieldwork, Navigating Conflict draws on archival and institutional evidence to locate urban schools in more than a century of local, state, and national change. Morrill and Musheno make the case for schools that work, where negative externalities are buffered and policies are adapted to ever-evolving student populations. They argue that these kinds of schools require meaningful, inclusive student organizations for sustaining social trust and collective peer dignity alongside responsive administrative leadership. Further, students must be given the freedom to associate and move among their peers, all while in the vicinity of watchful, but not intrusive adults. Morrill and Musheno make a compelling case for these foundational conditions, arguing that only through them can schools enable a rich climate for learning, achievement, and social advancement.

The volume aims to shift the foundation of youth conflict study from the more typical focus on maturation, behavior, and personality to a characterization of youth as participants in society. It also expands the analysis of youth development to include societal problems such as political instability, unequal access to material resources, racism, and social injustice. Offering new insights about the interdependent spheres of conflict involving young people, this groundbreaking, international compilation describes processes of a violent world rather than of violent youth.

"Child and Youth Protection and Canadian Law, 2e is a thoroughly revised and updated revision of the Child Protection and Canadian Law 1e, and reflects the recent introduction of Ontario's new Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017"--

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.