No place for young people

WRITTEN BY Cindy J. Smith

In this very moment there are young people who are leaving home to build a future in the best universities of the world, but there are also young people crossing the desert to join groups of fighters, and young people trying to cross the sea in small boats to escape their harsh circumstances and hope to find something better.

Responding to gangs

WRITTEN BY by Scott H. Decker, PhD

This essay begins with a simple premise: if we don’t understand our problems we aren’t going to be able to solve them. This premise applies to challenges in a variety of fields: medicine, social services, education and juvenile justice. Criminal justice is replete with examples of well-intentioned efforts to curb gang crime and victimization that are based on incomplete or false understanding of the problem. Such examples include interventions that lack careful attention to implementation, are built on stereotypes or partial problem descriptions or lack sufficient “dose size” to make an impact. Oftentimes interventions are guided by media stereotypes rather than scientific approaches.

Brainwashing young people into violent extremist cults

WRITTEN BY Steven Hassan

The phenomenon of people and organizations using “undue influence” techniques to recruit and indoctrinate young (and old) people has reached epidemic proportions. While victim-centered approaches are now being discussed and utilized in trafficking realms, little attention has been given to the actual techniques and behavioral methods that can be used to enslave a person into a new “pseudo-identity” which is dependent and obedient to their controller.

Why children are leaving their homes? Unaccompanied children in Europe: what to learn from them?

WRITTEN BY Nadine Lyamouri-Bajja

More than 100,000 unaccompanied minors - mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea and Somalia - applied for asylum in 78 countries in 2015 (UNICEF).

These numbers do not take into account all children and young people who had to leave their homes and were displaced. They only represent those who applied for asylum, which are far from being the majority.

The rule of law in cyberspace is at risk

WRITTEN BY Alexander Seger

Criminal justice authorities need to be able to secure electronic evidence, including on servers in the cloud, to protect society and individuals against crime online. The powers to obtain such evidence must to be subject to data protection and other safeguards. Proposals to move ahead are now available.

Seeing the rights through children’s eyes

To mark the Universal Children’s Day 2016, 200 children from many countries visited the United Nations campus in Turin.

The Universal Children’s Day marks the day on which the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, in 1959, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 1989. The Convention, which is the most widely ratified international human rights treaty, sets out a number of children’s rights including the right to life, to health, to education and to play, as well as the right to family life, to be protected from violence, to not be discriminated, and to have their views heard.

Youth for Youth: We care, we act – European Union Aid Volunteers

WRITTEN BY Civil Volunteers Group

The European Union (EU) Aid Volunteers is an initiative that offers European citizens from the age of 18 the opportunity to get involved in humanitarian aid projects in the Global South. In particular, the EU Aid Volunteers programme offers:

Unlocking the power of youth

WRITTEN BY by Ahmad Alhendawi

For far too long, there was tendency to portray young women and men either as angry trouble-makers, or as photogenic, helpless victims. This is a false narrative.

Yes, it is true that many young people face tremendous amounts of violence in their daily lives. In fact, the statistics are horrifying: Approximately 430 young people aged 10 to 24 die every day through interpersonal violence. Globally, more than 600 million young people live in fragile and conflict-affected settings; and more than half of the world’s population of refugees are young people. But the truth is that while a disproportionate number of young people face unspeakable hardships, only a small percentage turns to violence. Still, this minority remains at the centre of global attention.

The process to radicalization and violentization

WRITTEN BY Mariaeugenia Benato

During these last years, some countries around the world have been attacked by terrorists’ violence and the number of citizens who choose to become foreign fighters has increased. Experts in terrorism and radicalization have been carrying out hypothesis concerning which kind of external factors could lead a common person to become a foreign fighter.

Diversity: an impediment within the justice system?

WRITTEN BY Ginevra Ossola

People with different backgrounds, with different experiences and heritages, bring different perspectives to the judgement of a case, impacting differently the decision-making process. How is this diversity dealt with? Human beings differ from one another by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and many more. Amongst others, stereotypical ideas of race and gender have been distilled into everyday rhetoric, in a way that shapes people’s identities on societal expectations rather than on lived experiences. Although very little is true and natural about these stereotypical constructions of boys and girls, the appropriation of these notions has led to a real damage and distortion in people’s identities.

The gross overrepresentation of LGBT youth in the juvenile justice system

WRITTEN BY Katherine Rankin

Although the term LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) may be new, the idea behind is anything but new. Same-sex relations can be traced back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however homosexual relations were not accepted until much more recently. In fact, the term homosexual was not used in the U.S. until James G. Kiernan referenced it in a Chicago medical journal in 1892, when equating it to a sexual perversion. In the 1920s LGB characters starting appearing on Broadway and, as a response, The New York Legislature banned the presentation of ‘sex perversion’ on stages. World War II helped to foster the creation of LGBT identity and communities, however the first declaration of the acronym seems unclear.

Reintegration of minors, affected by conflicts. Main obstacles and good practices

WRITTEN BY Renate Winter

Child Soldiers. They are cheap, available in vast numbers and expendable. They are easily abducted, or easy to force to join armed groups, and easy to control. They pose no threat to a military hierarchy as their obedience is easy to establish and to maintain through manipulation and control using fear and intimidation.