Dr Orlaith Rice presents at North South Criminology Conference

Dr Orlaith Rice (SLSS Hub, University of Limerick) presented ‘Gendered Pathways to Justice Contact: Young People in the Justice System in Northern Ireland’ at the North South Criminology Conference this week in Maynooth University.  The Conference in its 16th year hosts academic sessions on many aspects of criminology, including Pathways to Offending for Young People, Community Safety, Crime and Security, Young Adulthood and the Justice System and many more.

Orlaith’s presentation looks at the following:

Despite increasing scholarly attention towards youth offending, the empirical focus has largely been synonymous with males (Arnull et al., 2023). This is despite observed changes in the offending patterns of girls over the previous two decades, and a rise in the number of girls in justice systems (Zahn et al., 2009). Traditional criminological research, however, has not devoted sufficient attention to these changes, nor to the gendered experiences and trajectories of justice-involved girls (Pasko and Chesney-Lind, 2016). Thus, research focusing on the needs of girls and their pathways into contact with the justice system, and specifically how they may differ from those of boys, remains an understudied area. Furthermore, much extant research with girls in conflict with the law consists of either solely a focus on girls, or consists of retrospective accounts from adults 40 (Shepherd et al., 2019). This paper thus fills a research gap by reporting on contemporaneous accounts from both boys and girls (aged 14-19), in contact with the Youth Justice Agency in Northern Ireland. Collecting data from more than just girls facilitate comparison and allows for an analysis of what needs and pathways appear to be gender-neutral and which may be gender-specific. This qualitative, empirical paper presents a thematic analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with young people from December 2024 to February 2025. Whilst preliminary analysis indicates that there is considerable overlap in needs and pathways for both boys and girls, this paper argues that there are factors specific to each where tailored support would be of significant benefit to these cohorts in terms of desistance and harm reduction.