The previous chapter set out the principles, practices and progression of the use of diversion within the youth justice arena. We identified ambiguities surrounding the preferred objectives of diversion (for example avoiding contact with the formal youth justice system (YJS), preventing offending, restorative justice, meeting individual needs by facilitating access to youth justice and external services) and highlighted an insidious movement away from the principle of minimum necessary intervention with children and towards a contemporary form of interventionist diversion with a restricted group of children – first-time entrants (FTEs) into the YJS who have committed low-level offences. Although recent revisions to the pre-court process have sought to curb the potentially criminalising and net-widening excesses of previous diversionary practice, these developments have been primarily motivated by economic and pragmatic concerns, rather than by a move towards the more principled and (child-) appropriate treatment of children who come to the attention of the YJS in England and Wales. The chapter concluded with a detailed examination of the Bureau model of pre-court diversionary decision making, which served as a potential Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS) approach to inclusionary, engaging, legitimate and evidence-based diversion from the YJS and offending behaviour and diversion to youth justice and external support services.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of prevention as it has been understood and applied within the field of youth justice since being established as the primary duty of the YJS by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. We discuss how the ‘new youth justice’ that emerged from the Crime and Disorder Act prioritised reduction and early intervention objectives, such that much activity classed as ‘prevention’ since then has, in fact, been targeted on the reduction of existing risk (factors) and existing behaviours (for example officially recorded offending) by using risk-focused early intervention into the developmental trajectories of the same risk factors and socalled negative behaviours. We discuss how, consequently, youth justice prevention has animated the negative-facing, interventionist, net-widening tendencies of the risk factor prevention paradigm (RFPP), which is anathema to the principled and promotional objectives of CFOS. We outline a six-stage prevention-promotion constellation that situates targeted reduction and early intervention at one end and more progressive forms of universal prevention and (targeted and universal) promotion at the other.