Youth offending: resilience and protective factors

The assessment and rehabilitation of young offenders is an important area within forensic Psychology, however knowledge regarding resilience and youth offending is deficient as outlined in Chapter One. Chapter Two is a systematic review of the literature examining the relevance of protective factors in young people’s desistance from crime. A number of protective factors were found to significantly discriminate between re-offenders and desisters, and an interactive relationship between risk and protective factors received most support. In Chapter Three the strengths and limitations of a psychometric tool to assess personal resiliency are discussed. In Chapter Four this measure was used to examine whether resiliency differed between males who had nonsexually offended, sexually offended, and not offended. Differences in personal resiliency were found between and within these groups. Limitations and implications for practice and future research are discussed in Chapter Five. It is concluded that the inclusion of protective factors and personal resiliency, alongside risk factors, improves the prediction of offending behaviour. Furthermore, these positive factors appear to be instrumental to the rehabilitation of young offenders