Young People and Organised Crime: Vulnerable not Criminal!

The Department of Mental Health, Social Work and Integrative Medicine presents the first in a series of evening seminars.

Led by: Naomi Stanton

This seminar will outline how a project conducted with the Home Office to develop educational resources about young people and organised crime was able to avoid reinforcing misleading myths. It will demonstrate how collaboration with young people and practitioners before developing the resources allowed for a more authentic educational toolkit to be created.

The themes from the research will be presented, including:

• that young people should be viewed as vulnerable to exploitation rather than inherently criminal;
• that highlighting the potential impact of young people's engagement with crime on their families is far more powerful in prevention than the threat of penal consequences;
• that the stigmatising of minority groups is problematic.

The educational resources will then be presented and the opportunity provided for the audience to assess how well they avoid reinforcing misleading generalisations.

The key argument of the seminar is for the importance of collaboration with young people and practitioners when developing resources for them. This argument can also be applied more widely to indicate the importance of such collaboration when determining any policies, practices and interventions that affect young people.

Register your attendance here, or contact Alfonso Pezzella with any queries.