Introduction: ‘risk’, prevention and early intervention

In many respects, modes of intervention that ostensibly aim to prevent or ameliorate ‘risk’ play an increasingly significant role in shaping, defining and legitimising modern forms of child and youth governance. The multiple and fluid meanings routinely attached to the concept of ‘risk’, however, are not always clear. Some children and young people are conceived as being particularly susceptible to ‘risk’, implying constructions of vulnerability and invoking the imperatives of protection and safeguarding (as in modern child welfare discourse; see, for example, DCSF, 2007). Conversely, different constituencies of the young are deemed to comprise a primary source of ‘risk’, implying a threatening or menacing presence and invoking regulatory and corrective priorities (as in contemporary youth justice discourse; see, for example, HM Government, 2008).

Such binary conceptualisations inevitably tend to oversimplify (Goldson, 2004). Nonetheless, they each provide rationales for various forms of early intervention, greater levels of adult supervision, more intensive patterns of regulation and surveillance and, ultimately, circumscribed access to public spaces for children and young people. In the first instance, a variety of disparate factors – ranging from concerns regarding ‘stranger-danger’, predatory adults and paedophilia, through to the consequences of increasing road traffic, expanding car-dependent lifestyles, the diminishing quantity and quality of public facilities (parks, adventure playgrounds, youth clubs), the growth of home-based entertainment, organised indoor leisure activities and major developments in (and the proliferation of) information technology and communication systems – have combined to limit the visibility, activity and social interaction of children and young people in the public sphere. Alternatively, constructions of ‘anti-social’, disorderly and offending youth, together with an increasing array of dispersal powers, civil injunctions and criminal orders to which they have been exposed in recent years, have served to limit their movement, inhibit their public presence and subject them to greater levels of restriction, regulation and control.