Challenging pro-criminal attitudes and behaviours of juvenile offenders

Whilst research identifies pro-criminal beliefs and attitudes as strong risk factors for offending and re-offending, there is limited research informing workers about how to respond to these comments. This study explores the extent to which juvenile justice workers challenge young people about pro-criminal comments and how clients respond to the various challenging methods and skills used by workers. To understand the workers’ use of challenging, observations of supervision sessions between young people and their juvenile justice workers were undertaken. The findings reveal that young people commonly make pro-criminal and antisocial comments and workers challenge these comments in a range of ways that both engage and fail to engage young people.