‘Losing the plot?’ Reflections on the ethical and methodological challenges of ‘giving voice’ to young people in youth justice

Holt and Pamment (2011, p.126) argue that: ‘it is the very interplay of ‘young-person-as-offender’ which presents some very particular and specific challenges to researchers who want to work with such populations.’ Indeed, as both ‘young people’ and ‘offenders’, youth justice clients represent two of the most denigrated and marginalised groups in our society (Holt and Pamment, 2011). While much is written and said about young offenders in the public discourse, rarely are their own voices and perspectives included. However, a small, but growing body of research is emerging – amid calls for more – that directly examines the views and lived experiences of justice-involved young people. Unfortunately, the literature offers very little guidance for researcher
about how to manage the methodological, ethical and practical issues that inevitably arise in such research. This paper presents the author’s reflections on her experiences as a practitioner-researcher in youth justice, as she conducted her PhD research project that explored youth justice clients’ lived experiences of case management. It provides an overview of the key methodological, ethical and practical issues she faced while trying to ‘give voice’ to youth justice clients – and not ‘not lose the plot’ while doing so. In particular, the paper focuses on how the researcher attempted to redress the inherent power imbalances of the research context; and manage the challenges of data collection and analysis, in light of the prior interview experiences of young people in the criminal justice system, and their documented oral language and literacy skill deficits.