In Chapter One, we introduced Children First, Offenders Second (CFOS), a modern and distinctive model of youth justice that challenges established approaches grounded in welfare, justice, new orthodoxy and risk. CFOS is a principled, progressive and child-friendly model of positive youth justice, underpinned by the special treatment of children, adherence to children's rights and attendance to socio-structural inequalities. CFOS holds the central tenet that prevention (of offending and other problematic behaviours by children) is better than cure and is founded on the belief that children are part of the solution (to preventing problems and achieving positive outcomes), not part of the problem.

In this chapter, we set out the central tenets of a CFOS approach to responding to children in conflict with the law and the youth justice system. As we will show, this approach embraces both children who are identified as offenders and the prevention of offending by children – based broadly on notions of normalisation and inclusion. The central tenets of the CFOS model will be set out and contrasted with the main ideas and practices that have characterised youth justice (see Chapter One, Table 1.1) and which we see as having no place in the youth justice system (YJS) – thus drawing and deepening the distinction between the key tenets of CFOS and those of other approaches. Table 2.1 provides an illustration of the contrasts as we see them, which are explored in subsequent sections. In our view, a CFOS model of positive youth justice is as shown in Table 2.1.

We build on these contrasting tenets throughout this chapter as a way of outlining and exploring the principles, influences and drivers of CFOS – establishing clearly what the model is and what it most definitely is not.

Child friendly and child appropriate, not adulterised justice

A CFOS approach to youth justice views offending as ‘only one element of a much wider and more complex identity’ (Drakeford 2009: 8) for children, which should be addressed by a series of joined-up, inclusive and rights-based social policies. Thus we concur with Drakeford's (2010: 143) assertion that ‘a “children first” approach to youth justice must be embedded in a wider and more generic set of policy-making responses to children’.